MMT Chats: Solving Schedule and Capacity Challenges With ERP
For this MMT Chat, my guests hail from Omega Tool of Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin, who share their journey with using enterprise resource planning (ERP)—and their people—to solve their schedule and capacity load monitoring challenges.
In this 30-minute conversation, Omega Tool’s President Jed Weber, Vice President of Operations Randy Meissner and Sales and Project Manager Wes Stephens discuss enterprise resource planning (ERP) or more specifically their people and software solution to schedule and capacity load monitoring.
The icons show the areas of Omega’s business from which they can gather and use information.
Some key takeaways to whet your appetite include:
- As a shop we started to look at the available information, and how we could use the information. In our case, it was to give a real-time snapshot of our current capacity and future workload.
- The features and functions of Shoptech’s E2 software that really made the difference were the machine dashboard that allows us to see what each machine’s capacity is now and in the future. This is information that we input from our job breakdown.
- E2 has eliminated the need to talk to each machinist to determine the amount of time to break into the schedule. All of the timing information can be gained from one information source, while not interrupting manufacturing.
- The technology is not new, but rather the dedication to adhering to the schedule. This dedication by the whole staff has made the shop run smoother and has prevented awkward conversations with our customers about late deliveries.
This dashboard shows Omega Tool’s different machines, and how the team can determine the capacity. There are also numbers along with color-coding. Omega can then make a decision for how it wants to handle the capacity, ahead of when it becomes a crisis. There is a tab called “what if” (see top left) that allows Omega Tool to drop in a pending job, and see how it fits into the schedule. The team can do this without disrupting the schedule, which is handy for pending jobs such as repairs, quick turn-around work, and answering how long for a mold delivery with the current workload.
Watch the full video chat above, and for more of our archived MMT Chat conversations, click here.
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