Four Firms Use One Software System (May, 2000) "Overall, I’m most pleased with the team they’ve got and how helpful they are,” she says. “Their staff is probably the easiest group that I’ve ever worked with, and the most responsive to questions. They make it really easy for people to understand how things work. You’re not just a number at Henning, and that’s what I like about it.” Versatility, general ease of use, and a commitment to customer service through product evolution were factors considered in the selection of a shop management software system at Quality Metal Products of Niles, Mich. The company’s unique challenges demanded a versatile system, and its past history with software vendors made service and product support priorities. Quality is, essentially, a holding company that owns three other businesses. High on the company’s list of criteria for its software search was management’s hope that each subsidiary could use the same system. “We wanted our new software to at least have the ability to work with all of our companies – it’s so much easier if everybody’s on the same system,” explains Tiffany Albright, operations manager of Quality Metal Products. All four companies are located in the same building. They employ 18 people whose efforts are shared between the different corporations. The largest of Quality’s three subsidiaries is Metal Products Midwest, a fabrication job shop. In addition, Quality Metal Products owns Swing Shaper, the manufacturer of an instructional golf tool, and Metal Products Controls, a second fabricating endeavor involved in job shop work and the production of electrical enclosures. The company’s previous software was an elite MRP system. Although it handled shop floor control functions, those were not the main emphasis. This complicated Quality’s use of the system. Therefore, when faced with the decision to either buy an upgrade, or something new, Albright opted to learn what options the company had. Features to Improve Customer Services and Production Monitoring For the two fabricating operations, Albright wanted a system that would provide live data for customer service, as well as better job-cost tracking information. Visual EstiTrack from Henning Industrial Software (Hudson, Ohio) met all of the company’s criteria, but also provided other options, such as a flexible, detailed bill of materials, user friendly scheduling systems, and even an integrated accounting package (Visual Books, Visual EstiTrack’s optional integrated accounting system). "We found it easy to maneuver between screens, and it really seemed to cover our companies’ varying needs. The software saved us a lot of money because we didn’t have to go out and buy several different types of systems to handle individual scenarios, and it doesn’t make you perform unnecessary steps for the information that you want to get back,” Albright said. Flexible Bill of Materials According to Albright, the way the system handles assemblies is extremely convenient for fabrication shops like Quality’s, and for the increasing number of larger manufacturing shops using the system. The powerful bill of materials allows Quality to break each assembly down to its component parts. Each component is subsequently broken down to a sequential list of subcomponents. Albright says graphical tree format of the bill of materials makes it easy to see how different parts come together to form complex assemblies. That makes the current system much easier to use than Quality’s old system, which printed a list of subcomponents in text form “The bill of materials can be a hard thing for people to understand, particularly if they don’t have prints in front of them. With this system, you can look at it and see how it all falls together even though you may not know print by print what goes together. If you know what the parts were called, you know how they fit together as a unit. Items one through five are assembled first, and items six through 10 are assembled second, but then one through five become part A and six through 10 become part B, and parts A & B make part C. It makes it very easy to look at it that way,” Albright adds. In spite of this detail, the system also provides the flexibility to track each assembly, and present it to the customer, as a single unit. “As we build each assembly, all the costs roll together through the bill of materials. All of the manufacturing costs are recognized at that parent level,” she explains. “The customers don’t need to know that we break their final part down into 18 different pieces. They want to order part X, not parts A through T. We put an order in for one item. Once the bill of materials and quote have been done, the system recognizes that everything else falls beneath that." One System, One Staff In the same way ordering one part instead of several makes administration easier for Quality’s customers, using one shop management system instead of several makes day to day operations easier for Albright. Some of the benefits Quality gets from using one integrated system include reduced program maintenance, shorter training time, and increased employee versatility. All four companies share staff, so the employees sometimes shift from company to company. Using the same program to manage activities within each company makes this easier and more comfortable. Employees don’t have to learn another program, they merely adjust to how the system is applied to the different tasks they perform. Because screens operate in a similar fashion, Albright says it was fairly easy to teach the personnel at Quality how to use Visual EstiTrack. "They might be working with different items, but the general concept behind the screens is the same,” she explains. “It all runs and works with the same logic, so it was easy for them to make transitions from one function to another when needed." Savvy Scheduling The need for fast and efficient scheduling is dictated by the demands of managing different companies’ schedules at the same time. Because of the complexity of scheduling operations for all the different companies, and the number of different jobs involved, Albright takes full advantage of Visual EstiTrack’s range of scheduling features. First, she uses the automatic scheduling system to get jobs into the shop’s existing schedule. Because of the high volume of jobs being performed, this is seen as a most effective way to initially move orders quickly and automatically into the queue of the various companies. Later, as priorities become apparent, Albright uses the drag and drop scheduling module to adjust the placement of jobs on the schedule. "We could have as many as 200 different shop orders on the floor at one time that have been started or are about to be started. It’s just too time consuming to schedule them all manually,” she says. Albright sees advantages to enhancements in the drag and drop scheduling system included in the new release of Visual EstiTrack, Version 5.0. Quality was a beta test site for the latest release, which is now widely available. One of the improvements she saw is the addition of a drag and drop GANTT Chart Visual Whiteboard feature. The Visual Whiteboard is a GANTT chart display in the drag and drop scheduling module that lets users easily adjust jobs’ schedules by dragging a bar on the GANTT Chart with the mouse. The Visual Whiteboard’s calendar displays workcenter loads with icons that change colors to warn of problems, such as workloads that exceed predetermined, user-defined parameters for throughput capacity. The GANTT Chart bars also change color to warn the user if a job schedule has passed the established due date. "It’s extremely easy to see your loads at each work station because it’s a GANTT chart,” Albright explains. “If you have a customer who wants parts back sooner, you can move that job up and immediately see the scheduling ramifications. If you have the capacity to run 80 hours at a particular work center and now you have 90 hours scheduled, it’ll show you that. It turns red when it’s overscheduled or late, so you know you either have to move somebody else’s job out into the future, or you have to run overtime to get it done." Powerful Shop Order Monitoring Another feature in the latest version of the software on which Quality is capitalizing is the Shop Order Production Monitoring screen. Albright uses the screen to view shop orders, determining which operations have been completed, which are in process, and which haven’t begun production. Overall operating efficiencies for complete operations and those in production are also part of the line item break down of jobs this screen presents. In addition to reviewing entire jobs, the screen also lets users search for operations that meet certain criteria, such as those using a particular workcenter, or those with scheduled starting dates in a given range. This feature is convenient not only for managers with scheduling concerns, but also for material buyers, according to Albright. "You can look at a specific shop order, or you can look at everything that falls within a criteria. For example, all the jobs that are supposed to start today, or two days from now. Perhaps your buyers want to know what orders they have to review for material. If they buy a week in advance, they’ll search for those jobs, and all the orders that are due to start in that timeframe will be selected. They’ll be able to see all of those dates, where that material is being allocated, and when jobs are going to start to run so they know when to bring materials in,” she says. “Another advantage might be if you have vacation requests, you can find out what jobs are due to start at that time. There are a number of different applications that it could be used for because you can search by so many different things. Up to the Minute In-Process Reports Albright says that same search flexibility applies to a new Work In Process (WIP) report, which has been added to the newest release of the software. The report lets the user search for external or internal orders, even specifying billable or nonbillable shop orders for production steps whose costs aren’t passed directly to the customer. The new WIP report summarizes hours and materials allocated to selected jobs, giving the user the current costs for jobs, or specific operations already in production. That information can then be used when decisions must be made about how to proceed with a job, which has already begun, but is not proceeding according to plan. "We may have a job that’s running and an operator encounters a problem. To determine what we should do, I may look at the WIP report to find out how much money has been spent on the job already. That helps us solve the problem without losing money on the job. There are times when you need to know at a given point in time how much money you’ve got in a job on the floor. If customers call with changes after a run begins, they need to pay for production to that point and have you produce a brand new order in its place. This report gives you the information you need to do that,” Albright says. For shops like Quality’s two fabrication companies that typically guarantee a part price before production begins, the WIP report can be used to monitor costs on jobs to avoid cost over runs. Albright says other shops that don’t guarantee prices but bill on time and materials could also use the report to monitor costs and let their customers know if their bill will exceed the expected price due to production factors. "If it were a case where that cost would be passed back to the customer immediately, that may be something that you would want to advise them on, and you would have the information before you were finished. If you need to, you can show them why, for a specific order. You’re not going to say, ‘We need to do this, but I can’t show you why.’ With this you would have all the numbers in front of you,” she says. Ease of Use Wins Over Employees That versatility lets customers tailor their use of the software to meet their business needs. Some customers use specific sections of the software differently, depending on what kind of information they want to retrieve from the system or use at a different point in the production process. Because of the flexibility inherent in the system, it has been applied successfully in a variety of settings including screw machine shops, tool and die shops, fabrication shops, mold making shops, and even distribution centers. It has also helped make the program a hit with Quality and its subsidiaries. "The reason we like it is that we were able to make the system useful for all of the companies, not just the fabrication shops. That’s a problem with a lot of software, if it concentrates on manufacturing, that’s all it can handle,” Albright said. That success has come after winning over some employees who were skeptical about the software at the beginning. "It’s extremely user friendly. That was a major concern for us because we have several people who were afraid of computers and wanted to reject the idea of a shop being managed by a computer. They didn’t think it could be done,” Albright recalls. Now that original uncertainty has been replaced by confidence as the employees use six networked PCs to enter data and access computerized job cards. “We’ve proven that it’s very easy to work with, and it makes their jobs easier. That provides a comfort level for them as well." Employees clock in on specific assignments. The system collects their time and the number of parts made, giving management the data to check efficiency and determine quote accuracy. According to Albright, that information gives Quality a competitive advantage. "That gives us an advantage on the market to compete on pricing because we have a better feel for what drives our costs,” Albright says. Real Time Inventory Tracking Part of that feel for what is driving costs is derived from the program’s inventory tracking functions. Tracking inventory and labor helps Albright define true finite costs for jobs. Quality uses its software to track inventory in several different ways. The company’s subsidiaries work primarily with sheet metal, but also use tube and rod as well as other materials. According to Albright, the system understands the size and dimension of the material as well as the calculations for its use through the bill of materials. Once the job cards are entered, Visual EstiTrack determines the amount of material required to make each item and removes it from inventory as operations are completed. Adjustments are made in the bill of materials to reflect actual material use, accounting for the placement of clamps on sheets. This increases the accuracy of the software’s inventory function and shows the portion of each sheet, which is scrapped. The system can also track workpieces scrapped over the course of a production run, as well as rework, and total finished goods that are ready for shipment, inventory, or use at the next work station. Integrated Databases All of those functions are closely tied together. In fact, Albright says each section of the system can be used to contribute information to the next, helping customers retrieve data with whatever level of detail they require. Other items such as subcontracted operations, and even delivery costs, can all be added to increase the accuracy of job cost tracking. "It’s all linked. That’s the great thing about it, everything rolls into the next module, so it tracks actual costs. You can cater it to your own needs as far as how detailed you want to get,” Albright explains. The degree to which the software links its information to other modules increased with the 1999 introduction of Visual Books, Visual EstiTrack’s fully integrated accounting system. Visual Books shares the shop control program’s databases, using the information entered in production to administer a full range of accounting functions including time collection, payroll, banking, invoicing, accounts payable, and accounts receivable. All of that information sharing is done behind the scenes, according to Albright. She says instead of having to export information to Visual Books, Visual EstiTrack accesses the information without requiring the user to leave the shop control system. "In Visual EstiTrack, we actually have access to Visual Books information. We can look at invoices for a vendor through Visual EstiTrack,” Albright says. “Visual Books is represented as an icon within the program. We can get to Visual Books and see more detailed accounting information." Commitment to Customers The development of Visual Books is an example of what Albright calls the vendor’s commitment to customer service. The accounting package was introduced in response to requests from customers. "Everyone wanted accounting, and they didn’t have it at the time,” she recalls. “Now they’ve got the full package. It was based on what Visual EstiTrack users really wanted, which was nice. I don’t know many software companies out there to which you can say, ‘This would really be helpful,’ and they say ‘Oh, OK, if that’s what you really need, then that’s what we’ll do.’ It’s just not that common. With too many companies, it’s designed how they design it, and that’s it." That responsiveness to customers is one of the purposes of Henning’s annual user group conference. At the conference, the developers discuss upcoming improvements in the software with their users, asking their priorities for changes they would like to see. The direct customer feedback gathered at the conferences helps the company prioritize its agenda for upgrading the software. In addition to allowing users to express their priorities for future developments, the user conference also gave Albright the opportunity to meet representatives from other companies that are using the software. She said she appreciates the opportunity to network with other users and get their ideas, both on using the software, and on general business practices. "I met several people that use the software as thoroughly as we do. We talked about how we handled certain situations, like time studies,” she says. “I have business cards from everyone there, and when something comes up, I don’t necessarily have to call Henning to ask a question. We all work together, too. It’s real life support from people that are using it. I found that to be very beneficial." That real life support is especially helpful to Albright because of her diverse use of the software at Quality Metal Products. With her company, and its subsidiaries, on track, Albright looks forward to the continuing system improvements based on user input. She also wants to continue branching out the companies’ existing support network by helping others with training and implementation. Most of all, however, she is simply looking forward to continuing to use a product from a vendor who treats her like her company’s business matters. "Overall, I’m most pleased with the team they’ve got and how helpful they are,” she says. “Their staff is probably the easiest group that I’ve ever worked with, and the most responsive to questions. They make it really easy for people to understand how things work. You’re not just a number at Henning, and that’s what I like about it." 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