f you don’t have a software set-up, what do you do?
We’re smaller then what you seem to be talking about. I’ve been doing this for 25 years and my business partner has been doing it for closer to 50 years. Between us we can look at what work we have and have a really good idea what needs to get done, how long it will take, which machines etc etc. In short 90% of the “Routing”, “Planning” etc happens in our heads. This of course is a major downfall when you get larger and has been an issue in the past when we had gotten larger. At one time we had 15-20 employees and it became more of an issue, although we still managed to get everything done.
I’ve used MS project in the past for larger projects and in some cases it was more to keep the customer a breast of where we were than for our own planning. MS also worked for larger individual projects but quickly became worthless for long term tracking of machine time, routing and a bunch of small projects etc.
We generally have the same problem with job tracking as we do with ISO etc. A good portion of what we do is verbal. If you have a job that is 30 minutes long you simply can’t remain competitive if you have three hours of paper work that has to be filled out to get it done. At that point you’ve lost your edge over larger companies. I get work because the customer sends over a print at 8AM and if it’s a rush job they can pick it up at noon.
So the short answer is “We don’t use anything”…other then our heads. Both my partner and I can look at a job and know how long it’s going to take. We both also know what our load is and we both know what our capacity is. It’s not perfect, won’t work for a place where there is a break between the people taking the work, quoting the work and getting the work done are different people, but for small shop like ours it works.
For the most part we have been looking not so much for resource management as much as cost tracking. We want to have a better tool for tracking time on jobs then what we have now, almost entirely manual entry which is a HUGE PIA, especially as often as people jump from job to job. In my perfect world I would have a resource management system that I could create a job, enter the information, estimated time, which machines etc etc, it would spit out a routing sheet, that sheet woudl follow the job, people would clock in and out of the job via bar code scanner and all this information would be linked to our accounting software where invoices, PO’s, labor costs etc etc is tracked. I could then spit out reports on job profitability, resource management, bottle necks, mis-quotes/too much time taken on the job etc etc.
Again I’ve seen software that can do this, but it’s not been cheap, way more then we are willing to pay. Furthermore most of them require moving entirely to their system which is not only an additional cost, but new learning curve, plus typically a loss of all your legacy data.
Again I wish I had a better answer and the closest I’ve seen for smaller shops is the E2 shop system I mentioned earlier. I actually did a web demonstration and it was pretty much what we were looking for it’s just that they didn’t work with any other accounting software and that was deal breaker for us.
Hope this helps.
~Matt
