Shop software upgrade embraces cell phones and Palm Pilots

Job shops face many survival issues, and the importance of software flexibility and its ability to integrate new technology is a major one. Information is crucial. I have to be able to respond quickly to customer inquiries about a quote, a shipped lot, or a quality issue. We need to respond immediately with the answer the customer is looking for.

Certainly you have to build a product, deliver it on time, and maintain high quality. There is a fourth critical expectation: that you can communicate. As we have moved more and more to a JIT world, it's getting more and more uncommon for someone to give you a purchase order for 100,000 parts and ask for delivery in three months. Lot sizes are smaller, shipping dates are more frequent, and ship quantities are smaller as well. Those dates and amounts are being pulled in or pushed out, and increased and decreased. You really need to be able to communicate with customers in the manner in which they choose to work.

In turn, the shop must be immediately aware of an order change, whether a size has been increased or a date has been changed, so we can schedule accordingly. From a survival standpoint, job shops need the ability to keep pace with their customers' information demands, particularly the larger customers. Their MRP systems feed on information to make short-term decisions about production.

Our company is a Swiss screw products company, making items to order based upon specifications and blueprints sent to us by our customers. Under the current ownership since 1988, the company was founded in 1982 and serves a variety of industries, including electronics, controls, automotive, consumer appliance, and OEMs. When selling parts to Parker Hannifin, for example, parts we make might end up in a braking device sold to Ford, in something sold to Boeing, or to someone making machine tools or turbines.

Our 45,000 ft2 (4185 m2) plant, located about 30 miles southwest of Milwaukee, employs 50 people. Our primary production machines are 80 Tornos (Brookfield, CT) automatic Swiss screw machines. They are cam-controlled, not CNC. We have an extensive secondary department, where we have CNC lathes and other secondary equipment.

In 1999, we remained fairly satisfied with our 10-- year-old DOS-based shop management software, but our vendor would no longer support DOS, having already stopped providing upgrades. Although it met our needs well, we found ourselves lacking many features that companies currently seek in a shop management package-primarily the ability to interface with customers via e-mail and the Internet. For the most part, there were no serious Y2K issues, it was just that, as useful as the software had been, it had run its course.

During 2000, we visited trade shows, talked to others at screw machine companies, surfed the Internet, and sent away for information. Features and options available in much shop-management software are quite similar from one package to another. If it handles accounting, there are only so many ways to do debits and credits, pay bills, and receive cash from customers. For shop management, tracking inventory is pretty standard, as is collecting costs. It is the value proposition that is the strong deciding factor-what am I paying for versus what am I getting?

We looked at a broad price range of software, including some upper-end, really expensive systems. I didn't see them offering a substantial increase in value for what I'd be paying. We decided on Visual EstiTrack from Henning Software (Hudson, OH) in December 2000. I started receiving software in January, and we began working with it, loading and testing it, and trying different things, At that point, we started planning with Rich Henning, Henning Software's president, how we would get historical data from A to B. It was February 2001 when we started converting all our data and talking about future data-collection needs.

High among the benefits we identified with choosing Visual EstiTrack, was the understanding Henning Software showed for the screw machine industry. Software that presented a generic approach to manufacturing wasn't what we needed. For example, much of the software shown to me had components we don't require, such as an extensive bill of material for assembly manufacturing. We are a job shop, and we do very little assembly. So in terms of benefits, we really looked at the vendor's experience and ability to work with us during and after the sale.

We look at our information needs as a work in process. Customer history, for example, can be a problem. Some software companies pretty much told me I would be starting with a new database. Maybe they could help me get some customer or vendor information forward, but as far as job history, inventory consumption, or costs, that would be virtually impossible. We had maintained substantial history files, and they would be important to us in the future. All that historical information needed to be brought forward to help us do a better job. Henning was willing to work with us to bring forward as much of our history as possible.