hello everyone I’m Nate Fields associate editor for modern machine shop and I’ll be your moderator for today’s webinar
unveiling the secrets to achieving over 95% ontime delivery brought to you by Pro Shop in this session industry expert
Cody gidry from Coastal machine will shares proven approach and strategies for establishing unparalleled
reliability you’ll receive actionable tips that will Empower your shop to deliver orders on time consistently our
presenters today are Cody gidry and Paul Van Meter Paul is the president of Pro Shop a web-based and paperless Erp Mees
q and qms system specifically designed for the metal working industry they partner with shops who seek to push the
edge of Technology by going completely paperless strengthening their ISO and as9100 systems combining all their shop
software into one system and building robust business processes to achieve High rates of growth profitability and
performance Cody is the general manager and partner at Coastal Machine and Supply he has been working in the
machine in machine shops for the past 18 years in various roles including shipping QC inspecting quality
management Machining estimating scheduling planning and operations management Cody has been with Coastal
machine for 13 years he has led the charge in diversifying Coastal machine from 100% oil and gas into other
Industries including Aeros Aerospace space and defense for the past two years before we get started just a couple of
house keeping notes first I want to direct your attention to the panel that’s probably on the right side of the
screen you’ll see a tab that says Q&A so if you have any questions at any time during the presentation submit them
there and we’ll answer as many as we can at the end um also note that this webinar is being recorded So if you’re
not able to stay for the whole thing or if you want to refer back to it or share it with a colleague you’ll get a link to that recording via email usually within
a few hours and with that I’ll hand it over to you Paul and Cody all right thanks Nate appreciate it very much all
right all right well welcome everyone um yeah this is uh I’m excited for this one
scheduling and delivery is one of the most stressful difficult parts of running a Job Shop especially those High
mix low volume which uh typifies so many shops these days and Cody and his team
have done an absolutely incredible job of using uh all sorts of different tools
to achieve you know really incredible delivery performance um so I’m excited
to introduce Cody Cody welcome thank you sir for being here with me thank you so
uh yeah I think any other things you want to say about uh the intro Nate gave you a nice intro but no yeah he did he
did spot on with that one so not muchat on the on the partner part of it that
wasn’t always the case yeah so um so I want to talk about what inspired this webinar so this was uh three months ago
or so that uh you shared this looks like a screenshot from your phone actually um
where you shared uh real numbers pulled out of your system showing your ontime
delivery performance uh so this this this column in red is what we’re focused on here first and uh one of our folks
will yeah it’s already been uh Auber already sh dropped the link into the into the chat so if you want to go check
out the actual post itself so you know you were in the like low 70% range uh
even into the 60s different in the 60s yeah yeah um and you decided that’s enough of this we’re going to do
something about this and you got up into the 99s you know 98s 97s yeah really
quickly so anyway thank you for sharing that inspiring this webinar because I know it’s uh that’s no easy task and
it’s it’s a lot it’s and I think that what we hopefully we’ll reveal today is the solution for getting that is
different than than probably what most people think um it’s not about having you know just super whizbang scheduling
software that puts all your jobs in the right order is there’s a lot more to it than just that correct but thankfully in
some ways it’s actually I think simpler um but let’s get into let’s get into it
um and so the the slides you just shared that was of course the last year plus of
pro shop and but before you even had Pro Shop can you kind of set the stage for what what it was like um back them yeah
so I mean before we had Pro Shop I mean this is this is a good guess because it
was hard to get really get those numbers but you know we were probably anywhere in 50 60% range really probably maxing
out maybe 70% um on a on a good month um
you know we we were just all over the place you know chasing work down just trying to get a grip on
something yeah and uh I imagine it took quite a concerted effort from a lot of
folks uh working it all day every day yeah absolutely that was just a Non-Stop thing to to kind of manage delivery and
and scheduling and everything that comes with it sounds stressful yeah it
was so um so let’s uh we’ll share some stats here um so today we’re kind of
we’ll give you a sneak peek of kind of where they’re at today and then we’ll talk about how we got there um so you
have about 8 to 10 new jobs per day coming in uh you’re up to 22 you just told me
you’re about to buy one more so you’ll be at 23 machines about 52 people and
about 300 active jobs at any one time is that is that still about right that’s about right y yeah um and how long are
you spending currently yes 30 minutes an hour okay on scheduling and yeah right
right so and that includes um getting the getting the jobs in or maybe it uh I
think we actually have a little bit more on this getting the jobs in and then just tweaking the the schedule of
existing jobs to kind of keep everything kind of balanced and on track yeah um
about 30 minutes of an hour a day yeah awesome so that is um I mean I know many
shops where they have and I think you were you were in the same boat basically a full-time scheduler expediter type
person that spends their entire eight plus hour day just doing this yeah I me
that’s and that’s where you were at right yeah and getting 50 to 70% uh on
time delivery yeah so um this is you mean this is
these are impressive results I will say it’s not completely unprecedented we had a webinar that we did a few years ago
with a client that had about a hundred people on three shifts about 4 35 to 40 machines and they spend about
an hour a day on scheduling so it can definitely be done uh and your a
brilliant example of of the shift in um you know what that and and we’ll get
into the details of what that takes so this was printed out just uh last month
or a little bit I guess yeah more than a month ago um and it includes all the way
from last August so can you just describe for us what uh like what went through your head when you decided all
right this is enough we’re we’re tired of being late what what are we going to do about this yeah I mean it you know
one of our main customers we you know we have a yearly supplier review with them
and always just every year it was just you know bring up on time delivery on time delivery and it’s like you know
we’re doing all we can and then but you know really we wasn’t really doing all we can um you know so just one day we
were just I mean we were just tired of chasing stuff around and and you we were
doing so much work to try to manage delivery dates and it’s just crazy and
we’re spending more time doing that compared to if we just put the effort in to get all the work done up front and
and get all this right you know we spend so much less time on the back end now um
kind of managing the delivery dayses because everything’s right from the front and I know we’re gonna kind of get into that too and those processes but um
that’s what it did and you know we it kind of set goals out you know I didn’t expect this to do it that fast to be
honest um kind of set some goals out for the team say look if we can get to 90%
in the next two three months that’s great and the next two or three months we I mean you can see we got 95 above
95% right away almost very close to hitting 100% for two
months yeah probably one or two ERS out of those 169 that just didn’t make it
quite on time yeah and I’ll note for people um there’s a couple things about this well first of all um looking at
this total number here this is the number of jobs that actually shipped in that period so you were down in you know
140 150 um and now you know hitting uh mid 180s so definitely a higher volume
of work at the same time that you’re improving that delivery and then here’s of course just the graph of of the same
numbers we see in the column and then I’ll also point out for folks that aren’t familiar with this um we and we
did this years years we built this page quite honestly probably 15 plus years ago at proc CNC our shop where we built
the system um and we wanted to know how you know how much of the time we were
actually a day early and then if we were late were we like one or two days late
or up to three or were we really late and you can see here in these numbers that like on the the on where you’re
almost at 100 you were at 100 within you know one or two days after that so if
you did have a job that was late it was not very late um you know and then here’s some other ones where you’re you
know by by 3 days you’re in the 98 99 percentile pretty much across the board
um which means you’re even you know if something happened that you know a vendor dropped the ball or something you
know whatever happened it’s not a catastrophic event we can tell from these numbers that it’s just a little
slip yeah which is impressive so good job on that um and so obviously the
number of jobs went up but in this past period of time you have seen about a 40%
increase of Revenue is that that’s that’s still accurate correct yeah yeah and last year long we we increased 40
40% so and then we did this project you know the last half of the year so trying
to maintain that you know while influx of work coming in is a it’s pretty daunting task yeah I mean I know some
shops are are also similarly just crazy busy right now um but that often comes
at the expense of delivery like people are just taking in new orders and you know just shoving work in every nook and
cranny they can yeahum but often that comes at the expense of uh of delivery
performance which I think is a short-term strategy because if you start you know pissing off your clients that
uh absolutely they’re sending you work it’s not going to be and we will talk actually about that a little bit later
yeah um and it’s not only and just add and it’s not only new work from current
customers you know we’re adding adding on new customers you know diving into new Industries and stuff like that so
it’s yeah yeah so let’s talk a little bit about that um and the and the type of work so um so you were almost
exclusively oil and gas a few years ago and then um you got as9100 certified and
we worked you actually on some of those things and you made some introductions and you’re now um really branching out
into new Industries which I know from my own experience when you get new customers when you’re in new
Industries there’s brand new specs there’s brand new things you didn’t know about materials you’re not familiar with
there’s different types of cutting tools you need to use because of those materials and all that variability can
have a dramatic impact in sort of the execution of new jobs or even just
understanding you know new vendors that you need to onboard because your current vendors don’t do this mspec of special
anodizing because you’ve never had to do that before for your clients yep definitely
um and and then tell us about your your um mix of work like new versus repeat
and prototype versus you know what kind of volumes and stuff are you dealing with so in 22 we were about 5050 so we
had 50% reproduction uh repeat production and then 50% new work new work SL prototype combination of both
okay um so yeah that that mean that in and of itself says a lot uh you know
this is not just you know repeat jobs running the same thing over and over again this is a dynamic environment new
work new clients new things to discover all the time yeah so makes what you did even more impressive all right let’s
talk let’s get into the details of how you actually did this so we’re going to
um share here uh a couple of little screenshots um of things that uh
actually are in Pro Shop um but these are critically important things for you to sort of get things to make sure that
you’re setting yourself up for success and why don’t you just kind of share a little bit about what we’re seeing here yeah so I mean the the biggest thing is
is taking care of all the work on the front end you know you gota you got to get all your lead times right you have
to have everything right so I mean operation lead times you know if if you have an assembly Center um and it you
know this certain Assembly Center it all takes a day or two to for work to pass
through you need to have make sure you have Leon on that uh set it to where it always it’s two days and same thing for
outside processing um outside processing if they’re quoting you five to seven
days lead time well that’s only if it’s a local shop then you have Transit back and forth so you have to make sure
you’re adding in all of those times too um so you need to make sure you’re accounting for transportation and
putting your lead times in right um and then not only that it’s it’s the time it
takes to get to the customer once it leaves your facility um so that I mean the the customers po that has a d they
has a d they they expected at their dock so you need to back figure that and if it takes four days to get there you need
to finish your work four days earlier yeah yeah yep absolutely so what we’re
and I’ll go into just a little more detail about what we’re looking at here so um so these these two upper little
screenshots are from the estimating module um where you can specifically set
a lead time for an operation so let’s say you have you know a part with um you
know three different Machining processes and some anodise and then you come back for some some Hardware assembly and then
you know ship and inspect and ship um so let’s say though that you know you’re doing a job where you have
to put in 20 inserts you know putting in 20 inserts is probably going to take you you know less than an hour right but but
like as you said if you know that basically all jobs coming through that that work center that department are
always going to take at least a day or two then it’s prudent to just put in sort of the worst case scenario right um
where it’s not going to schedule the uh the next thing that’s happening you know 30 minutes after the assembly operation
because everyone knows that’s just not going to happen yeah on the on the vendor lead time here you know we have
an anodized process with a price and lot charge but we’re also putting in like you said that roundtrip lead time so if
it leaves our dock we expect it to come back to our dock 10 days later and and uh that’ll you know calculate into um
all the other things about when the Machining processes have to be done um and then as you said uh the what we we
call them normal shipping days because you can always expedite things but if you want to save the cost uh because
generally if you’re Expediting a job that you’re late on that’s that’s your that’s your bill that you’re paying and
that can get pretty spendy um but this is in the contact module so we set this up for every client with uh just a few
different attributes and one of these is how long if we’re not if we’re not paying an expedite fee and we just stick
it on a truck or whatever method you know could be is your delivery van if they’re right down the street you know
that could be a zero day uh lead time but anyway and then the then actual work cells can can be uh have their own
standard lead times as well so you know a great example of that is the inspection department um so even if you
only have you know 10 10 15 minutes of some final inspection work um but it
always there’s always a queue there’s always you know a batch of Parts waiting to go into that into that work center um
maybe it’s going on the CMM but you know there’s a little bit of a backlog go ahead and make sure you put in those those lead times uh so you’re setting
yourself up for the most realistic outcome basically the way I think about it if you put in like the minimum of all
these things you’re just shooting yourself in the foot and not setting yourself up for success to actually
deliver that product on time without spending vast amounts of time Expediting
and like running it to the assembly Department okay throw these inserts in right now I need these done in an hour
yeah and I imagine that’s what you did that’s that’s what partly what you and your team did before yeah absolutely and
and you just gota mean be real with yourself you know don’t don’t say yeah we’re you know it only takes really a
half a day to get this through when you know in your mind it’s there that’s just not how it happens so be real with
yourself and I just happen to look back you know just just just an Expediting charges Alone um compared to last year
you know this year year to date we’re probably saved 60% and experti in charge 50% yeah and it’s it’s all due to on
time delivery and you know getting a handle on the schedule yeah actually it was that was not even a sort of a metric
that we even thought much about um quite honestly at our own shop but we had a
client actually you know him Chris uh from East Branch um was on the same
system you were on uh and they mentioned to us years ago in a video I guess it
was that they had saved more money on Expediting fees to processors and
overnight shipping charges than their Pro Shop subscription cost them on an annual basis yep they used to spend you
know tens of thousands per year on all those fees and uh cut them like 97% so
yeah awesome um that’s a that’s a home run in our book um all right this is
another key part of it what you started doing can you tell us a little bit about this quoting realistic leave times yeah
so I mean prior we would just quote jobs and not really look at the schedule too
much um you know just take on work and then just you know throw it throw it over the fence and let manufacturing
deal with it um you know but then now now that we have this you know approach
and we got to handle own things and we know what our actual lead times are of every single machine no matter what um
you know we can be more proactive we can well if we know if we have we’re quoting on a large order we can you know put a
placeholder in the schedule and just say yeah we know this is coming um or if we kind of want to see you know what jobs
is going to push back um or when we’ll actually end the order you know um well
we can go ahead and throw it in a schedule um that way we can have an accurate time and give you can give our customer an accurate lead time say know
this is or if we do this you know you will push these jobs back um so yeah
yeah and sometimes that is a uh you know a strategic decision you want to make you know if you’re if you’re you know
quoting for a new client you really want to provide them with the lead time they need um saying you know we can slide it
into this slot right here it will mean we’ll have to pay an expedite fee for this other job but we’re happy to you
know pay that in order to to land the you know this this new job for this client that we really want to get
um but being intentional about that is the key right you don’t want to just quote some work throw it over the
wall to to you know programming and machining and say good luck guys you know hopefully you get this all out in eight weeks um yeah and I know so many
shops do that um and sounds like you used to do a little bit more of that um
so yeah being proactive that that is the name of the game for that one yeah definitely all right and we will get
more into the Nuance of uh of this collaborate collaborative approach in just a few more slides
here um and so the other thing we call them placeholders uh for this slide but
what we in Pro Shop they’re actually called Phantom jobs so you can uh insert
you know on any work center um a job of X length of hours and uh and just see
what that looks like how that affects because how that affects the other jobs down the line because it’ll basically
turn those jobs red if they’re not going to uh meet that uh what we call the mustle by date um and that is I think
one of the we don’t have a slide for this but that is one of the differences between Pro Shop and your old system
where we’re calculating when a job needs to be finished on a work center and then ultimately when it needs to leave your
shop to go to outside processing even if that’s multiple times y um as opposed to
just having a due date and you having to do all the mental math to figure out what does that mean for all the
different operations yeah correct all right
um yeah so there’s the tip don’t just uh blob new orders over the wall and hope
they can deal with it you definitely uh want to work collaboratively so let’s talk about your new order process um and
this is really when we start getting into sort of the the the meat and potatoes of that really proactive
process of um not only when you’re sort of setting yourself up right for when
you’re estim in your jobs um but then once you win those jobs making sure all the boxes are ticked to um uh to make
sure you’re setting your stuff for Success so let’s kind of go through that yeah so um I mean when a work orders
when a we get a PO from a customer uh po type by sales um and then it kind of gets sent over electronically to um
contract review um so he they perform their contract review um and then once
that’s done uh it gets sent over into planning um and in planning basically kind of just starts the process of
finalizing the work order um it’ll go through a checklist you know he’ll look
at confirm material lead times Um send a p to the material vendor right away um
make sure the deliver is good on that um schedule it on a machine uh sometimes
we’ll cut POs to some vendors um ahead of time to kind of secure our date or
our order in their schedule um because the I guess a tip for that um and this
might be where you were heading was you don’t want to just pile a bunch of work on your vendor because then it’s chaos for them also um so it um we on certain
processes we’ll send we’ll cut appeel to them out right away um and let them know about this is about what date you should
be expecting this alter based on our schedule and this is the due date we expected based on your lead
time yeah so we do that and then once all of that is confirmed then we confirm
the order to the customer we don’t we take about 24 48 hours to confirm ERS to
customers um but we don’t do any of that until we know for sure we can hit that delivery
date sounds like a solid process and when you shared about this cutting poos immediately for vendors that’s kind of a
brilliant move uh you know we never did that at our shop um and I and I you know just having you describe that just makes
intuitive sense right you know plating vendors in particular any you know any kind of vendors but um you know they’re
quoting vast quantities of jobs all the time and they don’t really know what’s coming in and if you you know have some
parts that you know you know it’s going to be a batch of 50 pieces and they did
quote it to you so they at least saw the drawing in advance and gave you a price but if you’re like yeah you know in
about four weeks we should have these parts coming they might be able to you know start working on their racking or
just making sure that they in their schedule or whatever system they’re using they’re like okay we know this is
coming um and uh probably more likely to give you the lead time they quoted you
than if it just shows up on their dock one day and they’re like oh shoot now we have this you know all this work that we
just all came in at once and now time to use longer than they quoted puts you in a bind yeah definitely yeah and then
over on the right hand side of our screen here we see this uh this must be back on date can you just describe how
you use that yeah so it there must be back on just basically we’ll put that
date in our system um and we know this date this is the date this order has to
be back from this outside process for us to continue on our schedule and hit our delivery date so it’s just kind of an
extra flag in this in a scheduling module um it’s kind of a different color um so it’ll show up if you have more
manufacturing processes after or anything you schedule really really um you know after that outside process and
it’ll kind of give us like when we cut a PO to a vendor um you know we’ll have
their lead time to them but we know like this is the absolute date that it cannot go past this um because we you know you
always want to kind of pad things um for you stuff that happens so but we know
you know this is the date that this is our internal due date um this cannot be any any later anything past this we have
a problem y fantastic so I just want to kind of reiterate a couple points here um and
again we’ve made the point of don’t just throw jobs over the wall but it is so common in shops where you get a new job
and you just try you know the intuitive thinking is just let’s immediately get this onto the floor right print off the
traveler put it in a router packet with the drawing and like send it right out to you know to your machinists or to
your programmers or whomever um and thinking that you know the sooner you can get it to them that’s better um but
in fact that’s generally not the case uh if you do a little bit more of that sort
of thoughtful um contract review when and Pro Shop there’s a contract review
um kind of formalized process that’s kind of built right into the workflow or this war room planning which we you
mentioned here um where you’re getting together with a team um and just kind of
going through more details if it’s a more complicated thing if it’s an assembly I know we do have some
questions that are already coming in one about assemblies um so uh uh yeah so
that’s important um and then uh yeah this this this dashboard with all of
these um different things you’re doing some of that is what we see here on the right this PP check complete what’s
that’s called a in Pro Shop it’s called a pre-processing checklist and uh when
you even even though you know we’re professionals doing our jobs every day you know we know kind of what we do and
what we are supposed to do but checklist can be a really important factor um in
making sure you just don’t forget something you know don’t forget to double check do you need to order a
special thread gauge because it’s a new thread you don’t have your gauge or maybe it’s out of calibration and it
won’t be back on time um there’s just that level of detail that will bite you um without a checklist and our
inspiration for even in checklist into Pro up in the first place was a book called The checklist Manifesto uh which
we read years ago and it was from this study where uh surgeons decided or this
they were doing a study where they they basically did a pre-surgery checklist just the same way that a that a pilot
will do a pre-flight checklist they actually got the inspiration from pilots and when they put in a pre surgery
checklist for these these surgeons which are highly highly skilled and trained people
apparently and it blows my mind to think about this but the the risk or the chance of death based on a mistake
happening dropped by 40% just by putting in a checklist so if if a surgeon needs that
level of help to you know get their job right um I think we owe it to our to our
office staff our programmers our machinists to to have a checklist as well to make sure that all the million
little details that need to go right in a Job Shop uh a checklist can only help them out uh better as well y if you want
to read a little more about war room planning um go to LinkedIn and look up
my true position um a guy named Jim Carr has a podcast and he did one about war
room planning just a few weeks ago um so if you’re not connected with him connect with him but that was a good blog and a
podcast episode that he did y all right and let’s talk about your production meetings this is another
thing that uh that um yeah that you that you do yes so uh we have a production
meeting once a week um and it’s usually about an hour long meeting um and
anybody that is involved in the manufacturing process all department heads um shipping leads you know
customer support Specialists all these guys will be in this one room um and we’ll basically look at various topics
um we’ll have uh the we’ll go through the machine schedule for the week um
kind of look see if anything just crazy that we plan on doing maybe breaking off of a job to you know waiting on this
material to come in you know um we’ll go through open on ncrs list just kind of get a status of everything um then we’ll
look at um late vendor POS um and see what the status is on those and how it’s going to affect any
other deliveries um then we also look at um orders that clients are paying
expedite for um because those orders should never ever be late and you should
never ever move delivery um on those honors uh they’re paying for they they
they deserve a top spot and make sure that’s there on time um and then just
you know deciding if if delivery needs to be pushed out on something uh our customer support and planner um we kind
of they open up they use a dashboard that shows ERS that you know are trending to be late um they might not be
late yet but they they could be late based on where they’re at in the schedule um and they’ll kind of CER
through that kind of fix it up a little whatever they need to do U expedite something if they want to do it on our
dime um and anything crazy they’ll kind of bring that in that meeting and just kind of review it with anybody um to get
a better sense or to answer any questions or decide what we need to do solid process that’s for sure awesome
um and uh so that yeah I mean that um and before that’s your kind of current
state beforehand where you still doing just once a week meetings or were you meeting more often uh we went off and on
with even having production meetings um at some point it felt like it wasn’t we
wern’t doing anything and I think it’s just because we didn’t have the right processes in place um or the right even the right tools to to make things right
uh so I we went back and forth we would have them a couple times a week we would do them every day every other day um we
did it once a week it it was it was always varying yeah yeah all right we’re
going to shift gears and talk about targets because targets are a really important uh factor in in this equation
so uh the way that we think about targets and we thought about it this way at our shop proc CNC and I think a lot
of clients have adopted this as a as sort of a best practice so when and it’s
a three-step process so um at the beginning when you’re just quoting a job
you’re estimating what that job’s going to take you to come up with the price um the estimator whoever is you know in
that role maybe it’s maybe it’s the programmer that’s giving you some runtimes or set of times or whatever whoever is developing that number they
have the best idea at that moment of what it’s going to take when you win the work um we believe
it’s the best practice to have assuming this is a job that’s going to go to CNC
programming before it goes to the shop floor um that your programmers after they do their job they
have the next best um more refined guess of what that’s going to take right if
you have CNC simulation software obviously you can get much tighter numbers than than what your estimator
might think uh and then lastly once the job has you know hit the floor and
you’ve proven out your program and you’ve run your whole thing at 100% Rapids and feed rates and it’s just you
know ready to what we call Certified to run to prompt the machinists that did
that setup to refine it even further so here’s an example um you know David originally set
this uh this cycle time um at 27 minutes and then Paul the CNC programmer you
know when we got the job about a month later right he changed it to 20 from 27 to
25.5 and then Mary when she proved out that job and like done were ready to run
production she was prompted and and put in that it’s actually you know 24.8 and this is important because um
not only does it is it continually gets your get you more and more accurate um
but it sets the it sets all the sets the software up for success as well so if you have a 100 parts to make um this you
know the difference between this and this is you know that’s that’s more than two minutes that’s 200 minutes of time
that that’s going to that’s less time or more time sometimes the targets are higher um than what it than it should be
originally scheduled if you have bigger differences this is a pretty small difference but if you’re off by many minutes and you have bigger runs that
could be you know thousands of of minutes or or many hours of difference in time so that is an important aspect
of it let’s want to add um it it also sets you up for the next time you get the job
so when the job comes through again um it’s it’s accurate on the schedule right away that’s a great Point yep yeah and
um yeah and the other part not to do with scheduling but just more uh a tip
that’s really important and maybe you can share your experience on this as well is when when people see
unrealistically low targets uh it’s demoralizing for them right if they’re
like how in the world am I going to set this job up in an hour when it’s clearly a four or five hour setup like so so
when you’re estimating don’t sharpen your pencil by by dropping the hours right do it with margin so put in the
most realistic T targets always for for setup inspection and running or any
other things you need to do yep definitely awesome I think we’re slightly behind schedule so we’ll try to
pick up the pace a little bit I’m a little too for Bose today um so yes
let’s talk about um cued work and how you changed that yeah so what we used to
do um we kind of had some cued work sales so like let’s say for laid
Department we had a laid staging work sale um then for meal Department we had a mill staging work whatever Department
we just had a staging area that all the jobs would kind of get thrown into um and just kind of wait for the department
heads to kind of place it on the on the machine um and it you know it could be a
week or two three weeks later before that happens um and that’s when you’re finding out well no we can’t run this in
time um so what we did was we made sure at the planning phase um we start
putting it to the actual machine that is going to run out yeah there things could happen and it could change machines
later but it at least it’s on a machine somewhere and it has a place on the schedule so yeah we don’t use staging
areas anymore I think that’s a great strategy we definitely get asked about that all the time um you obviously can set up
cues uh where things are just kind of waiting to get assigned to the actual machines but you know people get busy
and and they’re just working on the Urgent and not being proactive and realizing oh my gosh I have you know in
my La Department I have you know 100 hours of available capacity and I have
150 hours of work that’s sitting in a queue that were now over capacity by 50%
we didn’t even realize it so yep great one on that um yeah let’s talk about
some of these uh you you you used to start tracking jobs that you were late
on but now you’re tracking why you’re late can you describe the difference there yeah so during the initial phase
where we were trying to just get on time delivery under under control um we would take the previous month’s
jobs that were late and we’d figure out okay why was this late was it capacity was it the vendor was it NCR was it the
customer whatever it may be um we were tracking that and then you know we kind of pared it and we realized you know
it’s just capacity you know we were just taking on too much work and not scheduling so we put the processes in place to do that um but in now I mean
once you had 95% ontime delivery you don’t have many of those jobs talking about two or three a month um so then
we’re like okay what can we do next so now let’s track why are we moving it why
are we requesting a new delivery date from a customer um so we now that’s what
we’re doing we’re tracking that to figure out okay why are we moving delivery dates is it because we’re still
just kind of taking on a little bit too much work is it vendors that are just kind of pushing up pushing us back and
that’s what you know that’s what it seems like is more of the case now so now we’re working on getting our vendors
on time delivery correct right y yeah awesome yeah um I mean I know you know
I’ve Heard lots of shop owners say this that they just want to you know in order to increase revenue and profits they
just want to shove as much work into the shop as they can and you know hope that all works out but um that you know that
can work okay in the very short term but I can assure you it’s not a great long-term strategy and obviously because
you’ve been increasing you know you’ve increased Revenue by 40% over the last year you’re
clearly pushing plenty of work through it’s not like you’re you know you’re starving the shop for work just so your
on time delivery is better you’re putting a ton of work through and still getting it there on time so y um
so uh when we were prepping for this you mentioned you were visiting a client and
had this sort of epiphany can you share what that was yeah um I mean we have just a local customer that we we kind of
visit every week and it’s we go on the same day every week no matter what um
and we’re over there visiting and then you know they’re just kind of all scrambling not really wanting to talk to us which is not normal um and then he he
just started talking the last day of month you know we’re just trying to get things right trying to get jobs in for venders and this and he’s like but not
y’all we have no problems with y’all and it it occurred to me is like I didn’t even realize it was the last day of the month you know used to before you always
trying to get things in the way at least delivering Parts the you know the same month that you said they were doing
um and just trying to make things happen for the month or you know you trying to hit certain Revenue goals whatever it may be um but now that you know our
schedule’s so so tight and we’re so on time we know exactly what we’re going to
hit every month and we’re not scrambling the last day of the month so it’s just like it was it was awesome to see how
far we’ve come you know compared to a year ago before that that was us um we probably wouldn’t be able to be over
there talking we’d be at our own shop scrambling good work yeah that’s that’s
a fun a little Epiphany all right so we’re going to just kind of go quickly through here some common dashboards that
you guys use um the ones with these little icons are ones that are set up on
auto refresh inside a pro shop so you know whether it’s every one minute or 30 minutes or whatever it just kind of
refreshes and then we’ll share a couple of pictures here of those actually out in in the shop um so again just real
quickly just kind of let’s let’s kind of go through these here yes so we have um and our planner
and so our planner and our customer support Specialists uh share an office um and they have a TV set up um and they
they’ll put on all kind of dashboards depending what they really want to look at but their main one is uh active work
ERS sorted by mustle by date so they always see the kind of the latest thing or the next thing that needs to go at
the top of that list um and then we also look at later schedule to be late work ERS that is the um the query dashboard
they both use to for the production meetings um the planner uses project assignment which kind of shows in any
new work that he needs to kind of push out into the shop and start planning um sales dashboard that shows backlog you
know what we’ve ented this month what we’ve shipped out um purchasing dashboard that shows anything that needs
to be purchased or vendor POS that need to be typed up um and then in shipping they have a dashboard that shows any
jobs that’s final inspected and ready to go to the client and then one right next to it that shows any jobs that it’s
ready to go to an outside process um then we use a customer service dashboard that shows all jobs
doe within the next week um we have the custom query about that shows jobs that
customers are paying expedite fees for uh open incs um and in my office I have
the sales dashboard the a finance dashboard that shows Whip and stuff like that and in shop progress that just
shows a progress of every job that’s going on in the shop um and then finally is your delivery numbers dashboard that
shows on time delivery very good awesome so let’s uh
share here so this is and these is blurred out to keep your data safe but um so that’s the TV that’s up in the
sort of planner scheduler office is that right or customer service yeah actually this one is the
one in sales uh this is our sales manager that yeah yeah I think we might have missed the one in the planning
office but it looks similar yeah they have actually a 50 in in there and I love this double vertical monitors and
one horizontal this is definitely the sweet sweet setup yeah um and then uh
yeah here’s the one out in shipping um and uh so you can see there’s Pro Shop up on the this monitors but then there’s
the big TV with again the venders and the clients um showing uh yeah what what
needs to what’s ready to go um and I noticed these uh these little file folder boxes and you do when you because
this is the one place where you do need some paper work right you need to print packing slips print the the drawings to
go to your vendors or the document packages for your customers yeah so these will get inserted into these um
when they’re ready to go yep absolutely yeah awesome um yeah so here’s another
tip uh because when you first implemented Pro Shop you did all sorts
of rig roll to try to tweak it from its original functions to make it work like
you thought it should work or your old system worked yeah collaborated on that yeah we were just I mean we we were
still trying to do things our old way which was I don’t know why we ever want to do that um our old way wasn’t good um
so we were just trying to customize Pro Shops or the way we’re so used to doing things or the way we want to see things
and then slowly but surely you know once we realize well this isn’t working well
let’s try the Pro Shop way you know we we tried that way and it just works so much smoother and things flow on the
dashboards the way they’re supposed to and everybody gives their notifications like they should and it’s just it works
so don’t bug the system do it the way the system in there’s a method to our Madness so um thank you for that so this
when we were again planning for this you mentioned you just recently cancelled an order maybe it’s earlier this year but
yeah um yeah tell us tell us where where that came from what yeah so I mean we had an order come in that probably
quoted a month prior than the the customer PE came in um and it went
through a normal process of contract review planning and everything and then once we you know it got into planning
and we started ordering material and all this stuff we realized there’s no way we can hit this date um so we had to go
back to the customer and say look we we either have to have this delivery date or we just can’t take the work we’re GNA have to you know decline it um so and
that’s exactly what happened they said well no I needed this date and I’m sorry we just we can’t do that it’s not
possible so have to cancel it so if they had placed the order within days of your quote you probably would have been fine
but by You’ gotten a bunch more orders and by that time you just didn’t have capacity anymore yeah yeah and so the
takeaways there is take the long-term approach don’t put your client in a bind imagine if they’d taken the order and
then called a week before it was due and said hey we need another week and that client was really pissed off at you
right so don’t do that to your clients yeah um here’s just a little bit before and after um because again you have
grown as well um so you have about four more machines about a dozen more people
we obviously know about the ontime delivery and you were spending a good portion of your full 8 hour day just
trying to to make things on on time yeah right yeah and obviously tons of human input and you’re getting stuff out of
spreadsheets and your Erp and all sorts of stuff and now you you spend very little so this this about an hour a day
that’s done by someone else not you Planner yeah the planner he does planning and scheduling
yeah very good uh so the next this next
slide is is is hilarious um I was with my partner Kelsey and we were down at at
your shop for your annual crawfish boil and this hallway that goes from the
offices into the shop you were telling us how it used to be completely packed
with with you know with files yeah um with folders job job folders you said
they were even because this is a steel frame door like magnet both on the edges and on the inside of the door because
there was no room left on the white board or on your uh your uh your sticky board on the other side yeah yeah that
was a nightmare I wish we had a real picture of real jobs that but so we
faked it with this this one and this picture actually is from another client
where this is the the system they used to have they used to have these manila folders with literally you know red
Sharpie handwriting and a picture and like scratched out things or don’t do this now do this be careful of
fingerprints um just the the difference the night and day difference in the
process is is so remarkable and so fantastic all right um let’s move things
along so now you’re spending about eight hours a day golfing is that correct I wish it was that easy um yeah
no no now I’m you know I’m able to be in the shop more just you know concentrate
improving processes efficiency um you know helping whoever needs help or whatever the department it may be um I’m
not so tied to the desk and and planning and scheduling jobs or anything like that yeah well that sounds like a lot
more enjoyable way to spend your day yeah definitely awesome um well there’s a few
questions here let us get into those um let’s see here um
Q&A prioritized let’s see here oh uh may have missed it but did they use another
Erp system before Pro Shop you want to share that Cody yeah so we used um E2
shoptech yeah awesome um so let’s see here oh wow there’s a
lot of questions um so that one is done how many how many of our jobs are
accounted for in hours oh how do you account for breaks lunch and other stopping points so uh in proot there’s
time tracking um and time punch or clock punches um so machinists or anybody will
clock in and out for the day um and then we clock in for jobs and then but on the schedule we account for that hour break
um that everybody takes uh for lunch um so that is a non-scheduled time on that
machine every day yeah so to put a little bit more Nuance to that you can obviously schedule fewer hours you know
schedule in an hour and a half less for a lunch and 2 15 minute breaks um but
there’s also a a function that we call the schedule efficiency multiplier um because even when you
schedule out your lunch break and your your other breaks um you know everything
doesn’t always start and stop the instant something happens you know finishes and starts like so when you
finish running another one job even if you have some break down time which we do have in Pro Shop you know let’s say
you have 30 minutes to break down the job and then you go right into your next setup that supposed to take two hours
there’s not a zero minute you know transition point where the breakdown is happening and now the setup is starting
like that next second so this schedule efficiency multiplier allows you to like
just like stretch uh time on the schedule so if you had you know a a job
that was 10 hours um but you had a one .1 efficiency multiplier on the schedule
then it would actually stretch that out to represent about 11 hours of clock time across the the work center and as
you start dialing that in over time you can just get more and more realistic of how long things actually take you um
including lunch breaks and people just you know going to the bathroom in between jobs or whatever it might be so
so that is a strategy that we can use um I have lost
my questions where are the questions Paul I can hop back in and uh
answer or ask some of the questions if you if you like’ be great for sure um so
yeah like you said we’ve got quite a few so um one up here is just how long did it take to uh Implement Pro Shop overall
Cody uh so from the time we started training to the time we went live I
believe it was like three months um yeah three months
all right and then uh next one we’ve got is um what have your customers said
about your new performance any uh positive uh reactions I’m guessing there are probably quite a few yeah definitely
positive um I we just got an outstanding email the other day that was shared with the whole company um but we and we just
had another um supplier review with one of our customers and it it they actually
gave us a better score than we scored ourselves uh we were trying to be modest but yeah it’s it’s been nothing but
positive that’s awesome nice yeah and then um what made you decide to improve
uh your ontime delivery when you were um already around uh 80% you still even at 80% you know when
you’re putting out so many jobs a month um when you’re hitting 180 or 200 jobs I
mean even 20% of that that’s 20% of those jobs you’re chasing down or you’re you know you’re trying to fix or
whatever may be and you’re just putting stress on everybody and now that we’ve done all that and we’re at 95%
everything in the shop just flows so much smoother and it’s people have less stress of a
job for sure yeah and then I think you might have touched on this one earlier in the presentation but this one asks um
how many of the eight to 10 new jobs per day are repeat orders you said about 50% right yeah yeah so we’re we’re last year
in 22 we were about 50% repeat 50% new workor gotcha and then the next one
we’ve got is for your scheduling um is a project a oneoff per machine or do you
have larger projects that have multiple components and stages to them um I would
assume you referring to like operations um so yeah it’s not just one op per
machine most of them can be four five six operations and they can span two
three different machines gotcha and next up um how do
you handle yield volatility that can sometimes make lead times or process times or yield yield quantities
unpredictable um I would say um we always pad things a little bit
um that’s oh and if you’re talking about I don’t know if he’s referring to um I
would say uh like if you’re scrapping apart or something um I don’t know
what’s your thoughts ball if you yeah I mean I think yeah if you scrap more parts than you thought you you know you
planned have one setup piece but now you need two and you need to buy another piece of material and then it puts you
back on tell the customer right away um as soon as we have a problem with an NCR
um a part whether it’s an NCR we’re sending something in or um we scrapped the part we let the customer know right
away that hey we just scrapped one do you want us to move on with it with the rest of the order and just catch this
next one up or do you want to just hold off on anything and this is the new delivery of the
Remake gotcha um next up can you elaborate on the difference between just
setup and part per cycle time and operation lead time what is the justification for entering an OP lead
time as opposed to just per part and setup I’ll I’ll take that one um very
often work center or op lead time is used for work centers that are not scheduled work centers um so if like an
assembly station or the or inspection or something that it you know you have like
you know Inspection Department you know you got jobs coming in from 40 different machine you know 20 30 machines whatever
it is very hard to actually put that in a Gant chart schedule um so those are
often the times where you just put in that work center leap time um which can get also combined with you know Target
lead time so if you know that you’re going to spend an hour to set up your CMM but then you actually have you know
a 10-minute run time to actually probe all 100 parts that’s that’s a, more
minutes of of time so sometimes that’s the right answer and sometimes it’s just a quick thing but you know it’s going to
take you half a day so you just throw that into the into the the lead time there hopefully that answered that yeah
like for instance our Inspection Department we do a two-day op lead time so we just say it always takes an extra
two days to kind of jobs to get through there for sure and um next one is what
is your schedule multiplier set to Brian um 1.1 uh we’re at 1.1 I would say if
you’re if and that’s because we’re so fine-tuned now um things it just runs
great um but if you’re starting out I would maybe start out a higher number and then reduce it down as as you you
know get more data into your system all right and next up um please
explain more about prints do you have prints created by engineering for each sequence or using the customer’s print
along with instructions for each Machining setup yes so everything we do is to customer print um but during the
planning process uh programmers or anything you know they they can put in written descriptions setup notes
whatever may be for The Machinist gotcha and then we’ve got when
you underestimate on a job significantly how do you handle the entire schedule um well hopefully you know the
plan for that is to find out before the job hits the machine um so he can get updated like Paul touched on earlier
with uh the programmers in in the programming Department um and and it gets updated if it’s something
significant where it starts to push thing out then we have to start looking at you know what can we do to bring this back in um whether it’s just expedite
stuff on our own time work extra hours whatever it may be for sure and next we’ve got uh does
production have input into how jobs are scheduled um do you try to run similar jobs together or just allow due dates to
dictate scheduling um I would say as a Comon comination of both um we do try to
run similar jobs together um Pro Shop there’s a feature called a run together um we can do that whether you know even
on the exact part number um that you’re doing the same setup on um it’ll throw it in the schedule as I run together and
it kind of puts everything together um yeah so it’s it’s a combination of
both um and how do you decide on what overtime is required on a given work
center um how much and when to meet delivery commitments um
that it’s a a case by case basis um if
the it depends you can go to the customer and if they willing to pay for the overtime you know and say no I have
to have it for if if customer is telling you you have to have it for this date there’s nothing you can do about then you got to do what you got to do um if
it’s an otter that was already paid for expedite fees um then you you get you know you’re doing what you have to do to
to get it out um I guess it depends on how important the customer is to you uh how important the job is to you right um
and then this one asks how was the transfer from your old Erp to Pro Shop did you guys previously use an Erp yeah
we did so we used um E2 previously um it was that the biggest transition for us I
would say was just go on paperless um and you know getting that out into the shop and it’s like you know how how
we’re going to live without paper um you know it was that was the biggest thing but once kind of everybody got over that
hump and and realized the potential that pushop had and every how it was going to just make everything so much better um
it it it flowed pretty smooth you know we took it step by step um and we just
kind of implemented things slowly and you know started very basic and then adding on to it like the the the pp
check um list we you know we started very small with it and then as we grew and understood it um we added on to now
we probably have 15 20 items on that checklist now awesome and I think we’ve got time
for one more question we’re running right up on three o’clock here so um this one says did you notice a change in
morale with your machinist after uh this process oh definitely um yeah I mean
it’s if if I’m running through the shop and you know chasing otter down and why is this late you know everybody’s
fussing and and hollering and no it’s not my fault it’s your fault all of this um especially out on the shop floor is
you know guys see that and um you know they don’t they don’t want no part of
that um so it kind of brings their morale down um and then now you know
everything’s positive it’s smooth the guys don’t have to work so much on a weekends shift um you know there they
don’t have to come out to be on call and work extra hours or anything like that so everybody’s living a much better
life sounds like it that’s awesome and um so yeah I think we’ll wrap up the Q&A
here we’re um at the hour Mark um so thank you Paul and Cody and I also want to thank Pro Shop uh for making this
webinar possible and also uh Coastal machine as well um and then thanks to everyone for listening in um again you
should receive an email with a link to the recording within the next few hours uh so thank you all for joining us and
hopefully everyone enjoys the rest of your day thanks mate thanks everybody apprciate thank you
