2/17/2015 (T-20) Engineering and Sales

2/17/2015 (T-20) Engineering and Sales

Engineering is one of the biggest hurdles at our facility. Engineers don't have enough time to design our products before production begins building. The schedule often changes based on material availability and customer demands. Engineering will be working on an item they think is starting next week, only to find out that their current design has been pushed out for three months, pending customer financing. Customer specifications are not always well defined or signed off on. Changes during production are rarely communicated to Engineering. Partial designs are often released by engineering. What system can accurately run MRP with inadequate BOMs?

We have a simple approach at helping purchasing identify long lead time items by creating Advanced Bill of Materials. This started off consisting of long lead time items. It has emerged into being a list of purchased parts. This ABOM is tied to the BOM for the finished product, then eventually has to be merged as each of the partial releases from engineering is structured in the BOM in the system.

This is a complex problem for any system. It took me months to create procedures, customizations and training to get the data correctly into our current system. We ended up going with a third party program that integrates our ERP system and CAD software. The third party still spent several weeks customizing their well established software, to accommodate our requirements.

The lead consultant and I spoke at length about how this is being handled and how he can handle it in the new system. He is going to write an import program to emulate what we are currently doing (to some degree). He committed to having that done by the end of the week.

Sales- I was only present for a small portion of the sales discovery. The new software handles sales orders much differently than I am used to. They developed their system based on our competitor's way of allocating materials through BOMs directly to the sales order, rather than to a stock code's BOM then to a job. I understand the concept, it is just a different approach.

I had to leave the Sales Discovery early to head to HQ to discuss setting up the VPN. We decided on a hardware device on each side of the VPN. We discussed speed and redundancy. HQ has both on their end. We need to address both concerns at our facility. Our ground is currently frozen solid. I don't see having new fiber installed in the next 20 days.