Visual ERP for a Job Shop--is it viable?

Legacy Contributor

Hi,
Our firm has been on Visual ERP for many years and benefited from many of its features. However, we have never well implemented the scheduling and material planning functions. In fact, we rely on separate databases for these functions.

We are now, anew and with increased discipline, attempting to utilize the Scheduling function.

One question lurks over our efforts: Is Visual ERP's Scheduling app unworkable for a job shop that often produces highly engineered, one-off machines?

We employ several dozen machinists on our shop floor and about a dozen engineers and designers. Our machinists are flexible and talented, moving, as skill permits and customer demand requires, from one functional area to another (from Assembly to Final Test, for example). We treat these employees as our Resources and their functions as our Operations.

Materials, also, present a special consideration for us. We run a lean inventory, stocking only common parts that are used in high frequency across projects. Our key parts for a job are not, typically, stocked. The purchasing process itself presents a use of a resource that we need to schedule and manage; they have their own milestones in the submission of RFQ's and PO's that can determine the scheduling of a job.

So, this question is very, very general. We want/need to be on a single database from Sales to Shipment and thought we could get there with Visual when we evaluated the software. We have one goal in using the scheduling system: delivering value on time and as expected to our customers.

We are committed to giving Visual ERP our highest effort and like to think of ourselves as creative problem solvers, capable of tweaking the system to do what we need.

We are beginning this process in earnest. Some who have been involved in the attempt to implement the scheduling system before argue that the software is simply inappropriate for "the way we do business". I'm not convinced; I think we can make the system mirror our methods--with a lot of effort and discipline.

We are attempting to learn the Scheduling system for the first time, in a sense--at least I am...this is my first involvement in the effort.

Any suggestions as to how best to proceed?

Thanks for your time and any follow up questions/comments.

tim-stanley

Hello. Your environment sounds a great deal like our environment. While we manufacture a set of machinery, it is really very custom from one customer to the next. Therefore a great deal of time is spent in Engineering. Add to that we also manufacture customer specified machinery. That is, the customer provides the drawings--we may never produce the item again.

We have used Visual since 1996. Only recently have we begun implementing the scheduler. And, actually, it is not complete yet.

Visual has been helpful in that we only used part numbers for raw material/purchased parts. The products that we manufacture have no part numbers. Therefore, linking work orders directly to customer orders is a huge boon for us.

Likewise, from time to time, we purchase material we may never purchase again. Thus, no need for a part number.

Items that we use for a machine are purchased directly to the work order. Therefore, we use the Purchase Requisition modules ability to import purchased parts/services directly from a work order. Purchasing is done from requisitions, completely linked to work orders. Therefore, received items are automatically issued to the work order, and we can schedule materials based on the desired receive date.

A large stumbling block for us was scheduling out laser cutting process for cutting sheet metal. We basically turned our laser into a part center. Each item cut out of sheet metal is assigned a part number based on the drawing number, the revision of the drawing, and the piece number on the drawing. We speced then had designed a program around this process. The custom program makes it easy to create "laser part numbers" inside of Visual. It enables us to import a file produced by our "laser programmer" that, based on the information from the export, calculates the material and time used for each piece cut on the laser as a percentage of the total being cut at one time. The custom program establishes a work order for each laser import. The parts cut from each "laser work order" are set up as coproducts using the calculated percentages for material, labor, burden and service. The custom program enables the laser operator to specify how much material that he used when closing the work order. The Laser Parts are set up as Auto-issue, therefore are automatically issued to demand work orders.

Our work centers are our shop resources, therefore our operations in our work orders. For example, welding or saw or cnc. For each shop resource, we simply specify how many work orders can be in a given work center at one time.

Our shop associates are skilled. Yet, they move from department to department if they are needed. Though for the most part, a welder will only weld. We determined it is too difficult to try to schedule people to machines. And, we have not yet tried to schedule specific machines for use. While we have 3 cnc's, we still consider them as a group, and that we can manage 3 work orders at one time in that group.

So far, we have found that the scheduler is not perfect. However, we are not looking for perfection. Rather, we are looking for a guide.

As I said, we are not complete in the implementation. Rather, we are getting accustomed to what the scheduler can provide.

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