Versatility & Efficiency Key to Job Shop Growth An interview with Tom Henry, Quality Manager Action Industries, Corona, California (909.272.4200) "Visual EstiTrack has increased our efficiency to the point where it will let us withstand the cycles of booms and cutbacks. We weren't forced to add as many people to our staff during our recent period of growth. We gained that efficiency through our new shop management software. That makes us hopeful that we can ride out the current cutbacks in the aerospace industry, without layoffs that might have occurred if we'd added staff." ….Tom Henry, Quality Manager, Action Industries. Versatility and customer recognition both played important roles in increasing business at Action Industries. However, implementing new shop management software also played an important role, increasing the efficiency of the shop's quality compliance reviews and job bidding processes. "Soon after installing this software," says Tom Henry, Quality Manager at Action Industries, we were able to maintain what we'd been doing -- and it provided a route to add capability." Small to mid size manufacturers and job shops like Action Industries respond to the same cycles of prosperity and decline as their customers, especially in the aerospace industry, where periods of rapid growth or decline are common. What is unusual about the circumstances under which this 27-year old Corona, California shop prospered is the way it increased efficiency and fueled growth. Action Industries is a 15,000-square-foot, 14-person job shop serving aerospace customers. Over the last 18 months, sales have risen dramatically, even for a shop in the business of defying gravity. Annual revenue is now close to $2.7 million, more than double its traditional annual total. Visual EstiTrack shop management software from Henning Industrial Software is one of the factors behind Action's recent growth: it allowed such dramatic growth to take place with fewer people than otherwise would have been required. Without the software, "we would have needed at least four additional staff members to keep up," according to Henry. "In addition," he feels, "our efforts to reach and maintain high levels of customer satisfaction have paid off. Customers recognize the quality of our processes. Repeat busi-ness is the driving force behind our business, comprising 80% of our shop's activities." The improvement brought to Action Industries' quality con-trol program is credited to Visual EstiTrack. "Aerospace manufac-turers must comply with intense quality control standards and scrutiny. On-site customer inspections and quality surveys may last from one to three days," according to Henry. "Thanks to Visual EstiTrack, we can quickly and easily retrieve any record a customer demands to meet its quality compliance standards." That effort, in the past, would have found Action employees digging through filing cabinets for the documents quality inspectors required. Now, everything's right there on the desktop. "As a result, Visual EstiTrack cuts the time of the surveys," says Henry, who has seen significant timesavings for both Action and its customers. Similarly, if a customer calls with a question, whoever takes the request simply retrieves the document from the computer. They can tell the customer how the shop handled the purchase order, how the part was produced and from what material, when it was shipped, and the total production time. Henry credits Visual EstiTrack for eliminating a lot of paperwork. "It provides one easily accessible database, in which we store all the records to satisfy any customer's quality control requirements. "Before, we hand typed shop routers. But now, a database and the access it provides is the only way anyone can successfully operate a manufacturing facility," according to Henry. When customers have questions about parts today, or how the shop is handling an order, "that information is right at our fingertips, instead of being filed somewhere in a cabinet. Visual EstiTrack pulls up the particular job; with a couple of clicks I can answer almost any question a customer has. "There are numerous search options in Visual EstiTrack. You can search for a job based on the information you have." Henry continues: "Give me a part number or a purchase number, and in about five seconds I'll tell the customer whether or not his parts were shipped." Quick Quotes The bulk of Action Industries' business is aircraft parts, requiring a variety of aluminum, various stainless steels, or plastics. Volumes vary greatly, with orders ranging anywhere from 10 to over 2,000 pieces. Combine these vari-ables with the fact that the shop currently has over 615 different parts in its database, and you start to see the complexity of its bidding process. Until the shop installed Visual Esti-Track, "I had a drawer with over 40 diskettes full of information on parts that had originally been handwritten. Now everything systematic-ally flows through Visual EstiTrack. That's made life a lot easier for everybody," Henry happily volunteers. Competition for aero-space manufacturing jobs is intense, so shops must bid projects at prices low enough to win the job, yet still make money. Visual EstiTrack's estimating module helps: "It lets us alter the estimate easily and quickly," Henry points out, "when the purchasing agents come back to us with questions, or when suggest that we need to review our figures." "Similarly for repeat orders," Henry says. "The software now makes it easy for us to look back at a bid for a similar job, determine how successful that job was, and quickly submit a bid for the new job based on those figures. And that accelerates our turn-around time for bidding new jobs." The extremely competitive aerospace bidding makes Action Industries highly job-cost oriented. The burden rate is an extremely important factor in estimating job costs. Visual EstiTrack helps management accurately assess the burden rate through a feedback system that gathers every aspect of a job. Following each production run, "we compare the actual figures for every aspect of the job to those in our estimates to determine how well we really did. In that way, Visual EstiTrack helps us make money on repeat jobs, instead of 'shipping a check' along with the finished product." Visual Shop Floor Visual EstiTrack exploits the use of iconic representations of real world objects. A good example is its Visual Shop Floor screen, which helps shop personnel better visualize the manufacturing facility. Visual EstiTrack lets a user take operations and drop them – physically – onto iconic representations of workcenters when scheduling operations. Intuitive ways like this for thinking about an operation can be performed by anyone, anywhere on the plant floor. Once a job's on a workcenter, it's a simple matter to change the work-center's sequence of operations. At Action Industries, that's really helpful. The shop production manager has a constant struggle with schedules. "Our customers frequently change due dates; what's hot today might not be tomorrow. "We can do almost anything with an order," Henry continues, "once it's sent to operations. In fact, Visual EstiTrack gives us the ability to follow in-process any parts, even at outside an vendor." Outside services also appear iconically on the Visual Shop Floor. Does the job require heat treating, or a special bar stock? If so, drag it over and drop it on the appropriate icon rep-resenting that outside vendor. Further, when this is done, Visual EstiTrack understands that a purchase order must be generated for that service or material. Intuitive interfaces are evident throughout Visual EstiTrack, to help track jobs and provide information on opera-tions. It translates into ease of operation. That level of simplicity was designed into the system's TimeKeeper functions intentionally by its developers. The program's emphasis on icon-based presentation allows employees throughout the shop to comfortably use the system for data input, regardless of their level of computer expertise. Another singular aspect – made possible by Visual FoxPro's visual class libraries – was Henning's 'custom classes' that let Visual EstiTrack collect shop time in an emulated clock-card system. Operators clock in by highlighting their names on the computer screen. Then they use the bar code reader to scan their router, and the timekeeper tracks their time until they log out. To assist shop management, there is an executive management tool called the Shop Advisor. Shop Advisor quickly prepares an overview of what's going on with the shop. It identifies the exceptions that need attention. Shop Advisor presents the raw data as information that can help the decision-makers. "Our goal was a truly intuitive interface; many Visual EstiTrack users were likely not to be computer literate, so that was a keystone in our design," said Rich Henning, president of Henning Industrial Software. "In particular, for clocking in and out, the Visual EstiTrack time collection system uses a graphical metaphor that is similar to the time clocks with which most people are familiar." On a larger scale, Visual EstiTrack can grow from a single user to a multi-user, networked system, to meet changing customer requirements. It can control multiple plant locations from a central location. Much of the sophistication of Visual EstiTrack that gives the user a simple interface is due to the capabilities of Visual FoxPro. It gives the manufacturers that use it the ability to improve their customer service. With small shops continually facing increased competition as they bid to produce the same products, the only way they can distinguish themselves is by being more responsive to their clients. Being able to answer a customer's phone call and quickly respond with the information the caller needs, without a return call, is a significant business improvement. "We especially like the search engines." With Visual EstiTrack, Henry usually finds what he's looking for, gives the customer the infor-mation, and ends the conversation in two to five minutes. Before, he often had to jot down what the customer wanted, find the information, and call back when he finally found the information. "Now, everything's at our fingertips, which I really like." Shop manufacturing systems present a high degree of difficulty to program. To design an intuitive solution like Visual EstiTrack, would not have been possible today without a tool like Visual FoxPro 6.0. Scheduling and inventory control, job estimating, computing material requirements – all those areas are complex and time consuming, and burden-some to people who do them manually. Visual EstiTrack simplifies those tasks, and Henning has taken the simplification of those tasks to the next degree by making its solution a truly graphical and intuitive one. Moving documents between processes via drag and drop removes much of the burden found in other systems, but it's the tools of FoxPro that make it easy to hide the system complexity. What is an easy to use application program? It is not a 'simple' program; rather it is one that divorces the user from having to deal with the complexities, a program that provides the simplest interface by which they can get a complex task done. A truly easy to use software package is quite a sophisticated program requiring sophisticated programming tools. Software design played a big part Henning created its own class libraries to facilitate the drag and drop and automatic document creation. The solution takes advantage of the full range of features offered by Visual Foxpro. Henning has exploited Visual FoxPro at every programming corner. Not only by relying heavily on the visual class libraries, and the ability to create additional classes, but also by employing the highly capable object orientation of the language did Henning manage to create a very large application. Using any of the less capable, older procedural languages, Henning could not have developed the sophisticated and complex system that is Visual EstiTrack as quickly, or as easily. FoxPro's object oriented programming paradigm supports encapsulating logic associated with an object into a method. Objects are therefore self-contained black boxes. In addition, that, in turn, supports the development of very large applications, without being concerned about the issues of 'stepping on' other code. Visual EstiTrack, a purely FoxPro application, has enabled more than 200 shops nationwide to auto-mate and simplify complex operations in an elegant manner. |
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