The Dude
Hot Rolled
- Joined
- Oct 19, 2010
- Location
- Portland, OR
This question is mostly pertinent to job shops where multiple people are involved in the "NPI" (new product introduction) process. I'm curious to know what kind of newer technology (if any) you use to keep track of all the information related to the process from initial customer contact through successful launch of a product and, to some extent, how you archive information for those that don't pan out.
Just some background: we are a 12 person job shop and we might do about 5-20 quotes per week (high acceptance rate) and many of those are for new customers. We have a quote "check-out" Excel sheet that basically is manually updated, we write quotes in Word and email out as PDF's. If successful, almost every job requires new tooling, drawings to be filed, data to be entered, etc. To date, this has been done through "brute manual force" (lots of verbal communication) but, thanks to business increases, we need to "get our act together" a little better. The only thing we "for sure" are going to do to improve in the future is to perform our quotes with much greater automation in our ERP system. That will reduce a huge amount of manual work but there's still the whole "tracking" issue of making sure tooling & raw material gets ordered, inspected, stored and all those other little details that are mostly after an order is received.
About the only example of potential new technology that I intend to investigate is salesforce.com or similar. My only experience with this was for time tracking in a former consulting agency I worked for. It can gather and organize information but, beyond that, I don't know much about it and wondering if anyone uses it in a job shop. Outside of that, just wondering if someone out there has found some good organizational tools, whether they are on-line or manual. I've also thought about a manually updated white board just to track NPI stuff where we have a daily stand-up meeting just to talk about exceptions (i.e. stuff that's late, etc.).
I understand that many shops don't do a lot of quoting and/or are real small so that one person can "do it all". Just to repeat, this is more pertinent to shops that do a lot of NPI and have several people involved that all need to be informed and coordinate their activities so that things happen in a timely and accurate manner.
Thanks,
The Dude
Just some background: we are a 12 person job shop and we might do about 5-20 quotes per week (high acceptance rate) and many of those are for new customers. We have a quote "check-out" Excel sheet that basically is manually updated, we write quotes in Word and email out as PDF's. If successful, almost every job requires new tooling, drawings to be filed, data to be entered, etc. To date, this has been done through "brute manual force" (lots of verbal communication) but, thanks to business increases, we need to "get our act together" a little better. The only thing we "for sure" are going to do to improve in the future is to perform our quotes with much greater automation in our ERP system. That will reduce a huge amount of manual work but there's still the whole "tracking" issue of making sure tooling & raw material gets ordered, inspected, stored and all those other little details that are mostly after an order is received.
About the only example of potential new technology that I intend to investigate is salesforce.com or similar. My only experience with this was for time tracking in a former consulting agency I worked for. It can gather and organize information but, beyond that, I don't know much about it and wondering if anyone uses it in a job shop. Outside of that, just wondering if someone out there has found some good organizational tools, whether they are on-line or manual. I've also thought about a manually updated white board just to track NPI stuff where we have a daily stand-up meeting just to talk about exceptions (i.e. stuff that's late, etc.).
I understand that many shops don't do a lot of quoting and/or are real small so that one person can "do it all". Just to repeat, this is more pertinent to shops that do a lot of NPI and have several people involved that all need to be informed and coordinate their activities so that things happen in a timely and accurate manner.
Thanks,
The Dude