Software Helps Shop Bridge Transition From an interview with Matt Owens, Plant Manager, Death leaves a huge void in a family, throwing traditional roles into turmoil and forcing the survivors to learn new skills in order to carry on. This truism is even more certain when a death occurs among the ownership of a small, family run business, where the owners and managers typically perform multiple mission-critical functions for the company. At the Arkco Manufacturing Company of Arkadelphia, Arkansas, that was the scenario in March 1997 when one of the shop's owners passed away. In addition to his role as owner/general manager, Wayne Schuetzner had acted as the shop's chief information officer, designing, writing, and maintaining custom software programs that he used to help manage the shop for more than 15 years. Supervisor Matt Owens soon was promoted to plant manager, and while he was able to keep the shop's machines running, its computer system was a different story. "After Wayne passed away, so did our software support," he recalls. "Plus, we were operating on a really old computer system, basically a 1970s operating technology. For years, the programs had been really good," Owens remembers. "We could get them to do everything, but after Wayne passed away, we couldn't keep the hardware up and running." Because of the shop's substantial history of computerized operation, Owens and the surviving owner felt they had a good idea what they were looking for in shop management software. The decision was made to purchase a new shop management program, and to upgrade the shop's computer hardware to accommodate the new system. Five workstations with Windows 95 and a Windows NT-equipped server were chosen to support the new software. Owens remembers that, even with the shop's previous computer sophistication, when selecting a commercial shop management system, it encountered unexpected pitfalls in its software selection. "The first shop control software we chose wasn't very good. It wasn't reliable. We had lots trouble. I spent an average of two hours a day trying to fix the system, because it would crash. It really wasn't benefitting us at all. The system was from a very large, well known vendor, but it was really confusing and very limited in what it was capable of doing," Owens said of the shop's first program. The problems created by that software merely exacerbated the troubles the shop already was experiencing. It merely made matters worse, instead of helping run the shop more effectively. In spite of the significant investment Arkco had made in the program, the decision was made to dump it and find another one that would be more in line with the shop's goals for ease of operation and efficiency. In October 1997, the shop's software search began anew. But this time, Owens knew where to look for the pitfalls. From a narrowed field, the shop's management decided on a trial of Visual EstiTrack from Henning Industrial Software of Hudson, Ohio. The system was so impressive that Owens "installed it and Arkco shop personnel have never looked back to their time using the competitor's product with anything except relief" over a chapter in the shop's history that now is finished. "With everything we've got going on at the shop and only two management personnel, there's a lot to do. It definitely has been a benefit to us in making the changes we've made over the last year to make our shop more efficient," says Owens. "Our shop was really struggling after the owner passed away. Adding Visual EstiTrack was one of the best things we did because it freed me to take care of many other things that needed to be dealt with. If I still would have to spend half of my day trying to correct and fix the software like before, we wouldn't be in anywhere near as good a position as we are now. This system's really freed me to deal with the matters in the shop." The new software also freed the shop's widowed owner, allowing her to return to the state of semi-retirement she enjoyed before her husband's death forced her to return to running the shop. When I took over as plant manager, she came back out of retirement to help me run the shop," Owens recalls. "After getting Visual EstiTrack, within the first month she was able to cut back to working on a part time basis." Owens likes to compare his current situation with the one created by the company's first commercial shop management system – one Owens says was full of bugs due to a poorly researched transition from DOS to Windows. "They really didn't put enough research and development into it before they released it and it was just filled with bugs and problems. I had problems daily. I called Henning less in the year we've been with them than I called our previous software company in a typical week. I know that I have lost less time total with Henning than I lost in one typical day previously," he said. "It makes everything so much better, especially for me. I don't have to work those extra hours each day. Particularly, when the system was down for three hours, it probably really cost me an entire day; after dealing with that I was so frustrated that I didn't work efficiently for the rest of the day. And, I worked a lot more hours accomplishing anything." Owens wasn't the only one who suffered as a result of the system's lack of reliability. "The owner would come in two to three days a week to do invoicing, and I don't think there was any day that she came in and was able to start and complete the invoicing without something happening. Never once." While he and the owner bore the brunt of the problems with that system, Owens says everyone in the shop knew about the problems and that effected how they felt about the entire shop. In fact, the program's reputation among the employees was so bad Owens says they quickly assigned it a derogatory nickname. "It really had a negative effect on our whole shop to have to deal with this system it was so bad," he said. However, things have turned around. Even the installation of Visual EstiTrack was easier for the shop than the one he endured with their previous program. "When we decided this software was definitely what we wanted, I did the whole installation myself over the weekend," Owens said of the shop's new shop management system. "On Monday morning, we were operating it. We started on Visual EstiTrack November 1, 1997, and it's going really well." The vendors who supplied the shop's old system, on the other hand, predicted an installation period of eight months to a year. "That's how long they said it would take to get up and totally operational on their system. With Visual EstiTrack, I came in here and did it by myself in one weekend. That wasn't everything, but it was everything we needed as far as sales orders, purchasing, and invoicing to be operating on it by Monday morning." Though operational after one weekend, Arkco forced itself to keep the old system on-line for another month to ensure nothing was overlooked in the transition between the two systems. Or, to respond to any questions customers may have had about recent or in-process jobs. According to Owens, the difference between the two systems was noticed immediately. "There is no comparison with our interim system. You couldn't operate that system without the manuals at your side. I guess I'm a typical male, I don't like to read the instructions too much, but now, I don't have to – this system is just so much easier than anything we've used. When you try to do something with this system, it's self-explanatory," he said. "Learning Visual EstiTrack went really well." Although Owens knew a training session would be in order at some point, it wasn't scheduled immediately because he wanted to find out what the shop personnel could learn about using the program on their own. However, after a few months of using the system, he felt they had a good handle on what parts of the program they needed help learning, or just didn't have time to teach themselves because of the other problems the shop was working its way through. Therefore, after the program was fully operational for a few months, the shop scheduled a one day training visit from the vendor. That helped Owens get the program's inventory allocation feature tied in and working correctly with the shop routers to remove raw materials from inventory when they were sent out to the shop floor for production. "Until the class, we felt really familiar with the basics; we just needed a complete overview of the system operation to learn all that it was capable of doing and what it might not do. A lot of times there are other ways to do things that make it easier. We did learn some of those, like being able to double click on a date field and bring up a calendar instead of having to type it in. This system has little things like that and it does make things easy." He said the shop's experience with its Henning training session compared favorably against one presented by its former vendor that Owens had attended. "I went to our previous vendor's office for training for three days, and I really didn't know more when I finished than I did before I started . The system even crashed frequently during the training classes." Arkco uses most of the Visual EstiTrack modules, starting with estimating. Owens uses the program to develop his estimates, and issue his bids for jobs. If the bid is a winner and the shop receives a purchase order, he then uses the estimate to create a sales order, and then transfers the estimate to the shop area where a shop order and bar coded routers are created based on the original estimate. "Every operation goes through the router and is entered into the time keeper. The operators sign-on by scanning the job number with a bar code wand. They clock-in on jobs, and keep track of time spent on the jobs and parts produced," Owens says. "Because we use the shop routers to track our inventory, when operators use raw stock, our software subtracts the stock from inventory based on how many parts they make. Then we can cost our jobs out to make sure everything went the way it should." Owens does that by printing and reviewing daily production reports. The reports give him the actual cycle times and operating efficiencies. "I can glance down at the rates to see if the cycle times look correct for the jobs, or if they look wrong. If an operator runs at 60%, or 160% I can question that and find out what happened and make any necessary adjustments on the cycle times," he said. Owens feels he relies less on reports and more on comparisons of actual runs versus information included in his estimates than most other shops do. "I rely mainly on the information I have in the estimate. That's why I like to print out the daily production reports, so I can see where they were. If I have somebody who runs 60% on a job every time it comes up, then that's definitely a problem." When a job is complete, the shop uses the top half of its sales orders as a shipping notification. This simplifies preparing invoices, "requiring only a few mouse clicks and entry of the shipment number." After the invoice is checked for price and part quantity accuracy, it is finished and ready to print. Invoicing is another area where Visual EstiTrack compares favorably to the shop's other program, according to Owens. "It definitely give us more flexibility. With Visual EstiTrack we can change any part of the invoice. If we made a mistake and miscounted a part, which, unfortunately sometimes happens, or an updated cost is missed, we can make the necessary alterations. It has that flexibility," he said. With Arkco's discarded system, such changes could not be made. Once an invoice was printed, it could not be changed. Period. "You had to make sure everything was correct on the invoice before you printed it, because once you printed it, it was a done deal." Owens likes the way Visual EstiTrack allows him to quickly recycle estimates for repeat jobs, a segment which represents most of the shop's business. "We have a small repeat customer base, and a catalog of parts that we make for them. We make those parts day in and day out," he says. "We might not make the same part every month, but we routinely go through the same cycle of parts – some every month, some every three to six months, or every 6 months." The majority of the shop's business comes on repeat orders from existing customers, a group Owens says is made up primarily of industrial machinery OEMs that assemble the component parts machined by Arkco. That's where the convenience of Visual EstiTrack's integrated databases play an important role in Arkco's customer service, allowing Owens to quickly update existing estimates to produce new prices for customers, or to check on data from current or completed jobs to quickly provide accurate answers to customer inquiries. Owens is just as pleased with the customer service he gets from Henning as he is with the level of customer service his shop management software allows him to provide to his customers. Henning's customer service is a breath of fresh air, according to Owens. "In the past year, I have called very few times, but there's been only one occasion when I did not get someone to pick up the phone and answer my call. I caught them on lunch that day. I believe that's the only time someone did not actually answer the phone and deal with my question immediately," he said. That was quite a change. "With the other vendor, you were forever having to call, leave a message, and pray that you would get a call back within the next hour. Rarely did I speak with the same person twice. I had to call these people daily, and sometimes many times a day. The same person that I had just spoken with still never was available, they were too busy." According to Owens, the result was that if he waited for the technician already familiar with his situation, he often didn't hear from them the same day. Therefore, he was forced to start the process over on repeat calls, extending his down time while he explained the troublesome scenario over and over, saying, "'well, this is what Bob told me to do, and this is what Dan told me to do earlier,' and you had to waste a lot of time. And after you would explain everything, the person you were speaking with may not have been the correct person to solve your problem. It was really frustrating." With Henning, Owens says that more often than not, his questions usually arise because he doesn't pick up the program's manual and read it closely enough. In spite of the program's ease of operation, "There are times when you do need to read something, and I'll come upon something and see that it's a little bit confusing, and I'll call and say 'hey, I'm doing this, what's going on?' And within a couple of minutes, I've got the question answered and I'm back to doing what I was doing, usually thinking 'I should have read the book.' It makes a big difference when you can develop a personal and professional relationship like we now have. "The personal services you get from them are a big plus in my book. I had to deal with people in the past who never knew you and you never knew them. There was no personal relationship there. All they knew was what they read on the computer from the last person that talked to you. It was just aggravating to have to deal with that type of a situation." The combination of personal service and software functionality which Owens has enjoyed since switching to Henning has made him one of the company's greatest supporters. He has worked closely with the software company. While visiting the Henning booth at IMTS, Owens even inadvertently got involved answering questions and explaining features of the software to other show attendees. At IMTS, Owens went to the Henning booth to say hello. "When I walked up, I sat down for a few minutes and one gentleman was asking a question. His phrasing was to, but I knew what he meant." So Owens "jumped in and started talking with him and showing him what the software was capable of doing. Then I went back the next day, and I got involved again," Owens recalls. Well prepared companies looking for shop management software have many questions. "This fellow was from Australia, and had a lot of questions – I guess I just came at the right time and I started answering them. I really enjoyed that, and this system is so easy," that Owens felt comfortable doing so. In fact, he may want to consider a career in industrial software sales. His Visual EstiTrack demo at IMTS helped convince the gentleman he spoke with to become Henning's first Australian distributor. Because of the functionality provided by Visual EstiTrack, and Owens' ability to become as proficient as he has with the software in the year it has been in place, Arkco has been able to recover from the untimely loss of an owner. With the new software and management team in place, the shop is starting to look to the future. "I have lost less time in a year with Henning than I lost in one typical day with the previous system. That really says a lot. I can come in here and do my work and not have to sit here with my fingers crossed praying that it's going to do what I tell it to do. I know it's going to do it. I don't have to worry. That makes my work day much shorter and it frees me up to do other things in the shop that need doing. We have gone through a lot of transitions over the last year, and I didn't need to sit here and devote all of my time to the computer system. I needed my time to go out into the shop and deal with other things," Owens said. And now, with the right software vendor in his corner, and a user friendly, fully functional shop management program on-line for over a year, he can do just that. |
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