We are an industrial company specializing in single-part and small-batch production, processing up to 5,000 different components per year for various industries. To support our structural and procedural organization, we are looking for new software that covers all areas (no isolated solutions).
Areas to be covered:
- Article management (including parts lists, change index management, assemblies, group formation, serial number maintenance, storage location maintenance)
- Customer and supplier management (including classification, document storage)
- Quotation and order processing (including multi-stage preliminary and final costing, framework agreements, overview of delivery dates/order status, capacity reservation, partial delivery)
- Accounting (including payment transactions, payment notifications, collective payments, pro forma invoices, automatic display of customs tariff numbers, country of origin or tax rate, exchange rate storage, dunning, financial accounting, accounts receivable/accounts payable management)
- Materials management (including order-related goods reservations, deadline monitoring, coordination of external manufacturers (listing of pending orders sorted by deadline), provision of goods, tolerances for over/under delivery)
- Warehouse management (existing warehouses: tool warehouse, material warehouse, fixture warehouse, finished goods warehouse (Kanban), including complete warehouse movements, barcode scanners for goods removal, picking lists, stock reservations, inventory lists, automatic valuation according to last purchase/manufacturing price)
- Shipping (including orders ready for shipment, management of packaging units, entry of shipping instructions/specifications and tracking numbers, handling of partial deliveries)
- Production planning/control (including production orders per part, see also the following section)
- Tool management (including inventory, minimum stock, automatic ordering when data is reported from the tool cabinet)
- Quality management (including quality assurance agreements, 8-D reports, evaluation options)
- Test equipment management (including work plan, test intervals, consideration in capacity planning)
- Time management (including time recording, vacation and absence management, working time accounts, flexitime models, shift models, overtime evaluation, overview for payroll accounting)
- Purchasing/ordering (including external manufacturer management)
- Reporting (including flexible report creation)
- Workflow
- Control
- Maintenance (including work plan, inspection intervals, consideration in capacity planning)
- Task management, concept for optimal cooperation/information exchange
The most important requirement for us is in the area of production planning. The challenge for us lies in the wide variety of parts:
- 500 different parts on average in production
- At least 50 different materials
- 100 different external manufacturers/suppliers
- 10 CNC milling machines (3-axis, 5-axis – various models with different areas of application)
- 4 CNC lathes (various models with different areas of application)
- 5 employees in conventional production
- 1 production planner
In the current planning, it is not possible to use Gantt charts due to the confusing layout. Furthermore, there is a very high level of manual planning effort, as each work step must be manually assigned to individual machines or employees via individual machine planning. This makes status monitoring of the components very time-consuming. The new solution should simplify planning considerably through a high degree of automation (e.g., by forming part groups, assigning prioritized machines or “no-go” machines, displaying available secondary resources/preliminary work steps, order priorities, taking capacities into account (machine downtime, employee downtime, etc.), warning function for missed deadlines, scheduling of weekly buffer time).
Other relevant requirements are:
- Improving the transparency of processes by reducing the “search” for
- information in the system and providing good overviews/evaluations (e.g., upcoming deadlines, open items, missed deadlines)
- Change tracking
- Remote access
- Workflow control including substitute rules
- Email dispatch; integration of telephone system
- Languages: German, English
- Currencies: €, $
- Interfaces
- Datev
- MS Outlook
- EDI (EDIFACT)
- Personnel terminal Prox Data (each employee has a chip)
- Fax/scanners
- Barcode
- Reader/scanner
- Printer
- Label printer (DYMO LabelWriter)
- Telephone system via Siemens TAPI network at the workplace
- Display on mobile devices
- Tool cabinet (inventory and order data)
The software is to be used on approx. 20 PC workstations. Of these
- 3 Full access to all data and areas
- 5 Production for booking and viewing articles/drawings
- 2 QA
- 3 Order processing and materials management, production planning
- 4 Order processing and materials management
- 1 Restricted order processing and materials management
- 2 Additional in the short term
However, the system should be designed to cover 50% company growth.