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