– Welcome everybody. It’s great to have you here. I’m super excited today. We’re gonna be talking with Roush Yates manufacturing solutions and learning a bit about how they chose ProShop about the history of the company and how they use ProShop today to run their facilities. So I’d love to start right into it and hand it off to Todd English. So, Todd welcome. Thank you for joining me today.
– Absolutely Paul, thank you for having us today and thank you for letting us share little bit about our history and how we got into CNC manufacturing. Really what we think the future looks like. Our history is really rich and our history goes back to engine development engineering and high performance engines where Jack Roush and Robert Yates joined forces at the end of 2003 with the leadership of Ford motor company as well as our current CEO, Doug Yates. And that’s where Roush Yates engines was formed several years ago. But before that, we actually started manufacturing and machining in the early 1990s. And that’s when Robert Yates actually purchased his first CNC piece of equipment because then we were doing a lot of things manually. And at that time, Robert Yates came out with a set of cylinder heads that had 50 more horsepower than the entire field. Well, at that point, that was truly a competitive advantage. And at that time it took us actually three months to develop a set of cylinder heads. And when Robert came out and with that recipe, it forced us, NASCAR wanted us to do all the foreheads and also turn over how and what we did to all the other teams to make sure the environment was competitive. So we were forced into manufacturing at an early age but today on my right here we’re actually looking at our FR9 NASCAR engine. So for us in 2021, we’ll provide engines for all the poor performance teams on the NASCAR cup. In Xfinity series we have an EFI engine for our cup cars. We have a carburetor version. For the Xfinity teams but this platform here, we’re gonna machine 40% of the engine components in house. And again, that is one piece of our manufacturing business. To my left is a EcoBoost engine that is very similar to what you might see in your Ford production cars. We actually raised this engine from 2015 through 19 and at that point we were raised in an insole as well as WEC and FIA and it was a global platform. So racing at this engine was against Ferrari Aston Martin, BMW, Porsche and that was an interesting technology shift per se a working running production engine compared to a purpose-built engine. But again, everything we learned on this EcoBoost went right back to Ford motor company, went right back into the Ford GT. And again, a lot of technology development happened here at our facility in partnership with Roush Yates. But from the manufacturing standpoint even this engine on my left, the Ford GT we machine about 20 to 30% of those components. And again, racing changes so fast. So we’re measured every weekend on the racetrack. After that we’ll go back to work and we might come up with a new design. We might have the machine components within a week. And that also we have to have some time for some simulation on our engine sales in dinos to make sure that this what we’ve engineered or what we machine is gonna last the entire race that we use on the NASCAR side or emphasize. In 2016, Stuart Haas came on board and that added about 80 additional engines to our fleet of engines to support our NASCAR community. And that was one of the big push that we had into manufacturing. So behind me you’ll see a good amount of UMC Haas 750s as well as 1000. And we were fortunate to have that support and bring all that equipment. Also here at Roush Yates manufacturing solutions, we do have in the keynotes, we have some Yosses we have some OKKs. So we do have a good assortment of equipment depending on the job. But behind me is an 88,000 square foot manufacturing facility latest, automated equipment that we can find to really pursue other industries. As I mentioned, the percentage of components that we machine on these engines today at Roush Yates manufacturing solutions, only 20% of our overall business is for internal customers and these engines. 80% of this percentage of our business is actually looking at aviation is looking at defense, is looking at industrial, some other automotive sectors and also the medical market or something new that we’re pursuing as well for many years, right? A lot of information that was on the shop floor was a manual process and for us to continue to develop and leverage the technology we rely on ProShop to make sure we have complete visibility on our manufacturing floor from the production standpoint all the way through our shipping and invoicing standpoint.
– That is so cool. I’m a Motorhead, original shop cutter got into machining from racing and formula se. So this is just so cool and it’s such an incredible honor to see this and partner with you guys. So tell me just a little bit more you guys do hold some quality certifications, is that right?
– So yes, Paul we have AS9100 and we leveraged ProShop to kind of track that and go through the audit. We are pursuing, as I mentioned earlier the medical certification as per compliant again there’s several certifications including NIST and cyber security. So we’re constantly looking at kind of the demand in the environments that we’re working in and we always wanna pursue these certifications and we rely on ProShop to help assist and monitor that.
– Awesome well, very cool Todd, so that was a great intro. So next we’re gonna jump in with Jennifer Lefevre who’s the production manager there and she’s gonna show us in detail how they use ProShop or how you guys use ProShop on a daily basis to run the shop. So thank you Todd so much. I know you’re a very busy guy I appreciate your time. And we’re gonna actually gonna be able to do a full shop tour later this year. Is that true?
– Absolutely so I encourage anybody that might take a look at this on the website or if you push us on social media we’ll love for them to join us in three to six or nine months as we look to take another tour of our manufacturing facility located here in Morrisville, North Carolina.
– All right. I know people will be excited to see that, so awesome Todd. Well, thank you again so much and let’s jump over and talk with Jennifer. All right. Hey Jennifer, how are you doing? Thanks for joining us.
– You’re welcome no problem.
– [Paul] I thought I’d take just a second to get to a couple of the questions that have been coming in some of what you might be able to answer. Are jobs and work orders sent individually to each workstation by a manager when it’s time to run the job or they load it into some kind of list that the operator goes through.
– That’s a great question. And so if, actually, if I start to share my screen I can show the ProShop schedule. Let me get that. Yeah so we are using the ProShop schedule and.
– [Paul] Not seeing your screen yet. Oh, wait, hold on. There we go, now it’s coming.
– Here it comes, okay. And so all of the supervisors and actually all of the actually everyone in our organization has access to this so they can click on this within the modules and this is every machine or work center that we’ve determined we needed it to schedule and throughout or throughout our company throughout our organization. So if I look at the SL25, for example I can see what jobs are coming up and what should be running today on that work center. And so an operator can see if they’re finishing a job what’s next and they can see their supervisor if they have any questions about what they need to be doing on that next job. And then from there, they can, dig into the work order and see if materials here if we have all the setup instructions if we have everything ready to go. These colors also tell them that as well. The colors indicate what state in the pre-processing lists that that work order is in. So who’s left assign office, but that color tells me that we have the pre-check list done but an engineer hasn’t signed off on it and quality hasn’t signed off on it.
– [Paul] Very good. Yeah there was a question related to that. Are your internal engineers responsible for CNC programming as well?
– Our manufacturing engineers do majority of the programming. We do have machinists that are more advanced. People who have gone to school or had a lot of years experience. And so they might be five-axis set up machinists and they might be interested in starting to program. And so there are projects where they’re able they’re given the opportunity to program in coordination with a manufacturing engineer.
– [Paul] Right on. Cool. Yeah. If you’d maybe show us I see you got a bunch of slides there. Just kind of some of the, maybe the workflow of ProShop when you get a new job or how you’re managing work orders, things like that.
– Yeah so one of my favorite things about ProShop is when you log into the system this is the first screen that you see and this tells you right away what our organization’s goals and what are we trying to do and how does this apply to my job? So as a machinist or an operator, I’d be looking at scrap and say, okay I need to make sure I have less than 5% scrap on my job so then I don’t contribute to that overall scrap for the organization. On-time delivery, I wanna be on time for my operation, to my internal customer or to shipping receiving so that we can be on time to our customers. So first thing when people log in this is the first thing they see. So you can’t say, you didn’t know. From there everybody has access, different access based on their role. And mostly that’s most people have view access of everything. So you can, anyone can go in here and start to look through what I’m about to show you. So, most of the time I start here at production home I have a lot of quick links that I’ve set up for myself. And this is also customizable based on your role. We’ve got some quick reference guides that we’ve added for people. So if it’s the first time that your time tracking you have some quick reference that you can go and look at how do I do this? Or if I need to print a label, how do I do that? And then, so the first step, really in our process for, when we get a purchase order from a customer is to start the pre-processing checklist. So this is an example of one that we’ve completed recently and you can see all of these items in pink we require this to be done before we accept the order with the customer. And so if all of these things are done we know that we’ve covered all our bases we’ve reviewed their PO at length. We’ve made sure that our organization is prepared to complete the work on time. And we have all the right resources in place for that, even includes viewing that schedule and making sure that this job is gonna fit into our schedule. So we know when we confirm with our customer that we can meet their requirements that we truly can meet their requirements. And as you can see, a lot of different people from different areas of the company are involved in this, but that doesn’t mean they’re all in a conference room for hours. This is done, during their Workday five minutes at a time here and there and they’re able to make this progress throughout the day. And so it’s really cut down on the time that’s wasted walking to the conference room being in the conference room for hours for something that may not impact you or you may not need to get feedback for so.
– [Paul] And is that a process that used to happen in meeting rooms more kind of in person and in parallel?
– Yeah it was.
– [Paul] Or in series, I guess, before.
– We used to do opportunity review meetings, which would be before we quoted pre-contract reviews which was before we finished the quote and then final contractor reviews which would cover all of this information. And so the final contract reviews could go on for hours and we could get a dozen, when we started to grow and we started to get dozens and min 24, 36 POS a week, that’s when we’re like, we can’t keep managers in the conference room for 36 hours a week. They need to be doing their job for those hours. So ProShop has been a huge time-saver on that because it’s clear what the requirements are for each person and what needs to be done, immediately. And then we also list out what has to be done later. What is the manufacturing engineer responsible for before the job can be signed off that they’re done or quality engineering, preparing the print which Todd showed you like a print out on the workstation making sure that that’s available and ballooned. And then in quality programming, making sure that we’re ready to inspect the parts when the first article is prepared. And then even for the machinists, are they ready to run? Did they review all of their information and their tools and that their work centers correct. And everything for their part of the process.
– [Paul] Very good nice. I see you’ve customized that quite a bit. That checklist obviously.
– Yeah and that’s the cool thing too is this is all customizable so we can make it fit our organization and it gives us a good starting place as well. But from there, once we get through the pre processing and we confirm the order we start to get everything set up. So for me as a production manager now I’m watching the schedule. So I’m looking at the schedule and saying, okay what’s next on my next machine. So I’m running this order right now and then what’s coming up next and is that work order ready? So if I look at this work order, for example this work order has been through that pre-processing that you guys saw in pink but we don’t have a manufacturing engineer that’s checked all their boxes. They’ve checked it here but maybe there’s something that’s pending. And then we also don’t have quality signed off. As you can see Steven programming isn’t checked they’re not done. But I can see a lot of other things already, right? The raw material has been inspected. This is an operation that we added. We wanted to make sure we had a record and I can just go to this clipboard right now and go to the purchase order. And I can pull up the certs for that material and I can even pull up the chemistry scan that we’ve done at receiving that shows me the chemistry of that material. So all of that is linked and from the work order, I can see all of that information and so can majority of the people in our organization. So I can see that material’s ready but there’s some outstanding information.
– [Paul] So you’re doing that chemical scan just to verify that the supplier sent you the right alloy of material.
– Yeah it was actually a corrective action that we put in place. We had an instance where a mill sent us the wrong material and there was no way for us to know. So we invested in that equipment and we do that scan to confirm that their cert when it says 43 40, that it is 43 40. So there are some materials that that isn’t gonna help us with. But for the majority it’s eliminate a majority of our issues and we’re able to upload that scan right there. And so it side-by-sides if anyone has a question at any point they can go into ProShop and they can see the records. And before that would have been a paper printout in some file cabinet somewhere.
– [Paul] Sure, yeah.
– Once pre processing is ready and we’re ready to run then we’re gonna be looking at setup sheets. So as you can see here the manufacturing engineer has listed out all of the tools and he’s an even have a tool number here. So if I need to go get one of these tools, then moving in this up in a new tab, I can actually see a lot of information about that tool. I can see exactly which bin it’s in. So I can go to the tool manager and I can say, Hey this is the tool I need and here’s the bin. I don’t even, they don’t even have to look it up. It gives me a lot of information about the features of this tool, what the coding is and whether or not we have any in inventory. So, right now —
– [Paul] And is it this list that your programmers are using to decide what tools to program live in the first place?
– Yeah so if we go to the tool list this tells you all the different tools in our system and what we have in the shop. So like this tool, if you were looking to use U133 we don’t have any in the shops. So if that’s something you wanna use, then we need to order it or maybe there’s something similar. And so there’s a lot of different searches you can do. I can look through all the ball nose end mills and I can even search within this and say, well I wanna see one with the overall length of two and a half inches. So then here’s all of my different options, right? And whether or not there is any in the shop. So with that setup sheet and I can, as a setup machinist or a programmer or manufacturing engineer I can go to the tool room and grab the tools I need and start setting them up. That also includes possibly some written descriptions. So here’s a more detailed tool list PDF that they’ve attached with all kinds of different information about those tools. And sequence detail. They can tell me more information about what the tool position should be in the machine. And for example, like this tool is actually stored at that particular machine. So that’s good to know we’re not running around the shop trying to find it. Once we know we have all the things that we need to set up then we’re gonna be setting up and running a first piece. So this order is one of the is the bracket that you guys saw on the CMM. So as you can see here, we’ve completed one part and we’ve queued that part to quality. But the certified to run which means is that machine okay to run or first article complete which has that first article been completed, those aren’t checked. And so if I go into this operation I should see for one that a first article has been filled out by the operator. And what we require of our operators is for them to inspect everything they can possibly check. So on this particular part there’s a lot of profile call-outs and features that aren’t easy to inspect manually. And so the operator has inspected every feature that they can. And now they’ve submitted a part to quality and you saw there are the CMM. And so quality is gonna come in and fill in their information.
– [Paul] Very cool. And it looks like you’re tracking your gauge ID numbers. So if you ever need to know what gauge was used, where you can look that up?
– Exactly we can search for that equipment.
– [Paul] Very cool. And then you can also tell which employee did that inspection right by mousing over the actual result itself.
– Exactly so then if I have her here it says at 12 on 12 16, which was yesterday at 10:56 AM operator one, 10, four 42, filled that out. So and then I can go look at, actually, I think not on the screen, some screens that actually we have it loaded so that it pulls up that person’s picture, which is nice. I’m gonna show that really quick. So for example, what does Anthony what does Austin look like? Let’s see here. Of course, I’m gonna click on ones that aren’t loading. So then if I needed to find Avery, I can actually, Oh I know who that is.
– Yeah when you get to the size that you guys are sometimes you don’t know everybody, especially if they’re new.
– Yeah we’ve hired a lot of people this year. Okay so we talked about entering the first article information. So once the first article is signed off and approved and we’re certified to run, then we’re gonna be entering in process inspection. So I’m gonna open this in another tab so you guys can see it. It’s cool because you can drop it down and take a quick glance, or you could open it in another tab where you have more room to view. I do like that versatility. So this is telling me that an inspection frequency of 20% one in five parts, every fifth part, the operator should be inspecting these features. So you can see here, his first article dimension and then every time that he needs to add another part you click this button is not certified to run. So it’s warning me that it’s not certified to run. Are you sure you wanna go to this screen? Which is also nice. And then he’d be able to fill in that information here and click save changes and he could just leave the screen up and keep filling that information in as he goes. And so this record is viewable by anyone in the organization. So anyone can say, Hey, I wonder how that bracket’s running. And they could see this IPC And then once there’s a few points, a graph will display here and show you how that’s trending
– Right on. Do you have employees run multiple machines and just keep these up on the pages for each machine where they have that computer.
– Yeah so almost all of our workstations you saw, they have a PC at the workstation. Automation is one of the places that’s a little unique. So we have one guy that’s running maybe five machines ’cause they’re running unattended. So he actually has a surface tablet. So he might have multiple of these up on his surface and he just scrolls through them as he goes machine to machine to do some in-process checks. So really, really easy to use. And as you can see, like this is just so easy to use. It’s like a web browser. So everyone this day and age has used the internet. And so you’re using it just like a link. If I wanted to give someone a link to this IVC I can literally just copy this browser link send it to them in an email and they could click on it. It would take them straight to this page. So there’s never a question. You also can send messages straight from these pages. So if I click this little edit button it’s got a link right there on there at the bottom to exactly the page that I’m looking at. So if I wanna say, hey a supervisor of this department, let me know why there isn’t more inspection data, what’s going on or, hey, I saw that this is trending, take a look at this. They have a link. They don’t have to go hunting that work order. I don’t have to type the information and probably put a typo in there. It’s very effective.
– That’s awesome. I’m glad you’re enjoying that feature.
– So then, as we run, we’re recording all of this data and then, and this is an example of a first article that was entered. So here’s all of that data from the quality department in yellow, when it’s, approaching the limits and red, when it’s out of spec, that’s supposed to be a 30 degree and it was 45. So then look at this, they ran another part and then it came in at 30 degrees. And so now we can be certified to run. And so we have that first article and then we have that second, first, second, first piece that was submitted
– Right on cool.
– What else do you wanna know?
– Well, let’s see here. Question, how long have you been with ProShop and what was the implementation process like? And I know when we were prepping for this, you also so you used to be the quality manager, I believe or so tell us about your AS9100 as well that kinda maybe goes along with that implementation.
– Excellent so we went to ProShop. we started implementing ProShop in June of last year. So a year and a half we’ve been using ProShop. We’ve primarily only used it, for shop floor purposes at first and then we started implementing the QMS in January of 2020 and we were audited to ISO 9001 and AS 9100 in March of 2020 using ProShop. And we passed that audit and we are still certified today.
– Yeah that’s only two months. That’s an amazingly fast process. And I believe you did use our what we call our QMS assurance plan package which comes with all the QMS content already pre-configured and built in. Maybe you could show a little bit of some of that. Absolutely so another cool thing, just like everything else in ProShop it’s easily accessible. If I have Rover modules and I go into quality control or quality records, anyone in the organization can view this information. So I’m gonna click on a quality control, quality manual. And so here’s our quality manual. It’s, we’ve got our quality objectives context, organization, scope, quality policy all the normal things that you would see in your ISO 9100 1345, or AS 9100 quality manual. I can click on any one of these. And let’s see here, let’s go to our quality policy and I can read this information. We actually print this. The quality policy is on the back of every one of our employees badges but here it is right here in ProShop. Let’s see also, quality procedures. This is actually really cool because as you’d mentioned we got the QMS assurance plan package. So I’m gonna click here on archive procedures. All of these archive procedures were procedures that were provided to us. And so we were able to either take this procedure and make it active and modify it for our organization or archive it because it doesn’t apply. And so this is one of the reasons that it was so fast to be able to get it up and running from January to basically March 1st and then be able to be certified using the system. So these documents here let’s see. Internal auditing so a lot of this information and then like these flow charts these were provided to us and then we went in and we added our own information. So we have some special forms that we like to use, RYMS O141 but then a lot of the other information in here, it came as part of the package. So it was easy to get up and running. We can see this was originally released within our organization on two 18, we were certified three 15.
– And you’ve subsequently continued to roll the ribs and use our sort of internal. Can you just show real quick how maybe don’t make a new one but show where you would go ahead and launch that.
– Yeah, absolutely. So there’s a couple of different ways. So I can click here right away and say, create draft rev. And so it will create rev D draft. And so I can edit that and this will remain active, which is important. So we can still have access to our procedures. And then once that’s approved then you would see here that everyone has checked off their boxes and then it would rev the procedure to rev D and it would have that history here. And then for example, I just revised this last month, I modified the flow chart added some more details and added a couple forms that we were gonna use to aid our auditors. And so we have that history of, why did we make the changes and what were the changes? And I mean, it’s just really easy. It’s literally just browser clicks.
– That’s great. And maybe I see you have an equipment tab open. Do you wanna show us how you guys use it for calibration or preventative maintenance?
– Yeah, so we are using the equipment tab for our gauges. And so right on the, when I just go to equipment. So again, that’s under modules equipment. I can see all of the gauges that are coming due. There’s a couple here that don’t have a date. And so that’s a red flag for us. We need to go in and make sure we put a date for when they’re due or a calibration cycle. And then I have a couple that are past due. They were due last month. And then I have some that are still coming due this month. And so it’s cool ’cause on the dashboard right away, you can see the things that probably need your attention the most. And then of course I have, the guys on the floor are using this regularly. If I need a groove mike I can click here and see what group mikes are available in the organization. And then if I can see it here actually this one’s in QA for calibration. These ones are issued to our engine shop. And then all of these have cabinet locations which means they’re available for me to go check out if I need this for my job. And then within those records, you can see, what was the last calibration date? So this was last checked on nine, eight, 2020 it’s due next year. And here’s the record of the information that was collected from that gauge during calibration.
– Imagine auditors enjoy having this so easily accessible to them.
– Yeah I mean, especially like this day and time with everything that we’re doing remote, we didn’t know that COVID was coming but it couldn’t have been better timing because working from home is so easy. I can access all of this or if I have to do a teleconference like we’re doing now and share this with the auditor it just makes it so easy to pull it all up on the screen. I don’t have to go hunt down paper copies or go dig through file cabinets or have a big binder on my desk. It’s just so clean.
– Do you have any rough idea of how much since you were in quality before you became the production manager just how much time you might save switching from paper to paperless.
– So I would say, I would say something like four or five hours a day for me. So back when, before we went to ProShop I was working as the quality manager from 7:00 AM to 10:00 PM almost every day Monday through Friday and sometimes on weekends. And when over the time that we’ve transitioned to ProShop I’ve gotten that down to where I’m leaving between six and seven. So I’m only working half days. So I’m saving easily three to four hours a day over what I would do before.
– That’s crazy. Well, this has been amazing. We have unfortunately way too many questions that we can possibly get to but I’ll try to touch on a couple of one. Has ProShop resulted in scrap reduction?
– Oh absolutely.
– With better accountability.
– Yeah so we have just much better visibility of that. Everybody can see on that dashboard. I just stopped sharing my screen but everyone can see on the dashboard. Like what’s been scrapped recently. I’m gonna click on that really quick and when I click on internal quality scrap rate I can see show everyone’s dirty laundry and what’s been scrapped late and there’s your names. So and our customers a lot of different information is available. So that’s at everyone’s fingertips.
– Right?
– I’m sorry, I wasn’t sharing.
– It’s okay. I think if it are you okay to go a little bit over time?
– Yeah, I’m good.
– Okay I think we’re gonna officially go over time here. Question here. How do you handle scheduling multiple pallet machines when there’s several different jobs running at once?
– Yeah, that’s a great point. So let’s see here, let me find the schedule in all this actually you know what let’s just open a new tab. So what we did ourselves is so we have this that’s called the A61 group. And so we chose to put three of our machines together. And so all three machines are running this job and then all three machines will run the next job. And so that’s one of the ways that we’ve resolved it but also like this first A61. So you saw four, A61s ones out there. We have three of them combined into a group that they might all run the same job at the same time to, get that job done quickly. But this one machine, we kinda keep for random jobs. So we have some different kinds of outliers that come through as you can see, they’re pretty short cycle times and short runs, but we do have the advantage to run them overnight which gives us some expediency there. So that’s how we resolved it. I think that answer to the question. There’s definitely different ways to do that.
– Yeah, question here. Are all the tools that are in the machines inventoried in ProShop.
– They should be yes.
– Okay
– Yeah.
– Very good. And how do you do kitting? Do operators kit their own jobs? Do other people kit those jobs?
– That is a great question. So right now we are the setup machinists is kitting their own jobs but we are in the process of transitioning to having a person who is a former machinist and a very knowledgeable experienced person and they’re gonna be starting to kit. That’s gonna save our set-up machinists so much time so that they can focus on making sure that everything is right at the machine and not have to run back and forth to tool setting and hunting down tools and figuring out all of that. It’s starting to be ready for them. And it’s gonna save on tooling as well.
– Right very good. Quick question what kind of vices do you guys use?
– Oh, there’s a lot. We have quite a few vacuum fixtures. We have Kurt vices everywhere. We have a lot of mighty bite tooling. Yeah whole variety we use it all.
– I believe it.
– We’ve become very fond of the vacuum tooling with mighty bite fixturing because it’s just so easy to pull that off the machine and then put it back on for when the job needs to get set back up. So and that’s on most of our Haas mills and our standard mill centers.
– Very good, question about culture. With culture and environment in mind what impact would you say ProShop’s had on improving your culture?
– I think communication has just, I mean gone to the next level. It’s just so much easier for everybody to have the information at their fingertips. And it’s easier for us to be talking with the same language before with paper packets and whether or not the information got to the packet or got to the person or we just have, better accountability too because you can’t say you didn’t know ’cause it’s right there in the system, but also it’s just so much easier to communicate between all the departments and as you saw we’ve customized a lot of things to make that even better.
– Great I have a question clearly from a ProShop customer, ’cause they said what’s the star icon next to the drawing and part number. Usually we see a flag but you guys have customized that too. So you can change that flag into a star. And just for those that aren’t in the know that means that this is the time you’ve run a work order for that rev level.
– That’s correct.
– Yep.
– So this particular part was one of the ones he showed you on the floor and this went from a development revision to A, and so this order will require a first article to the customer. Here’s an interesting question. How many people in your company manage the ProShop software full time. Is Jennifer the only one what’s involved in keeping the job schedules and details up to date.
– So I actually don’t manage ProShop. I use ProShop on a day-to-day basis. We have, we call he’s a director of information systems and he is responsible for making sure that it’s working properly. And he communicates a lot with Paul and everyone at ProShop. And then we have two people that work with him to help resolve issues and organize information. We have one guy that has more like a computer programming background and then the other I’m actually counting them as one. There’s actually two other people that are making entries and setting up routers and doing more of like the data entry portion. So, I mean, I would say.
– But those are people doing their actual jobs like setting up jobs, setting up routing yeah.
– It’s really one guy and a computer programmer that works part-time he works about 10 hours a week for us, so.
– Right for most of our customers there is no system administrator or ProShop administrator. Everyone feeds into the system just the parts that they need to do, right? If they’re an estimator, they’re estimating if they’re a planner, they’re planning and if they’re doing scheduling, they’re doing that. One of the parts of that question was updating the schedule. So maybe you can just elaborate on how the quantities here on the work order, feed into the schedule automatically.
– Yeah so let’s actually go back to the schedule. So as the parts are completed and I’m gonna go back to some of my favorites and automation here, ’cause I know them well. So I can see like this work order 1428, it hasn’t started. You can see this bar is so long because it’s saying that there’s gonna be 249.33 hours of runtime. And that’s because that order hasn’t started, right? We have 32 pieces left to run. This order, we only have, we have 32 pieces on the order but we’re already through 26 of them. So we only have 76.89 hours left. And so it’s starting to shrink that bar and show us that we’re gonna be needing to start this job pretty soon here. It’s also telling me that the material or the parts have already been cued to this work center. So they’re ready to go as soon as this one’s done. This little arrow here is telling me that. We have one master scheduler and he’s basically taking that information from the sales group and putting it onto a machine. He works closely with myself as the production manager and the supervisors to say okay which work center is gonna be the best fit for this job. And programming also manufacturing engineering also determines that as well as like does this need a five-axis mill or it can go on a three axis and what kind of jobs are gonna go on which machine? So really it’s one person that kind of organizes the schedule and then all of us interact with it.
– Very good. Question from Dan here “How do you issue a tool out of inventory so it stays up to date as they are used?”
– So it’s really a matter of of course I’m gonna, we’re just gonna go straight there
– And I’m not, I think, yeah. I think actually cutting tool was probably what they meant rather than.
– Yeah so actually it’s for cutting tools what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna just reduce the quantity that’s available. So the tool manager, they would click checkout on this screen and they would reduce the total in shop to two. We have talked about issuing to jobs so that we can start costing and so that’s something that we’re working on implementing. There’s so much more that we haven’t even got to and it’s available to us in ProShop.
– In fact, I have a tip for you right now live. There’s a button a link right here to automatically reduce that quantity.
– Look at that. And There you go.
– Yep and you can make updates to the quantity if you’re right there at the bin looking at something and you’ll be like, there’s actually four of these in here. You can update that right on the fly as well.
– Awesome, learning as we go.
– Yeah this is great. Is this program used for machine and labor planning? I imagine certainly the answer would be yes. I mean that’s and maybe going to one of those work orders, when a part gets created in ProShop the routing steps as you like to see here, that would be, that would be established at what we call the part module, for those companies doing estimating that would actually be established at the estimating phase of things and that feeds directly into the work order and you can also have multiple routing methods. You can see, they have two of them here. You have one in 99. And, but yeah, so that clearly you’re and then the labor planning portion of things. So how do you have leads that decide which people are working on which machines today? Or how does that process work?
– Yeah, I have, so I have a supervisor for our standard non-automated mill a supervisor for the late department and a supervisor for automation. Each department has anywhere from 15 to 20 machines that they’re managing. And they each have anywhere from seven to 10 employees that they move around to jobs based on their skill level, based on whether or not they’re gonna set up or only operate, we have a lot of people that we get straight out of tech school, down the street and they come in and we have them operating machines. So that frees up our setup machinists to go set up the next job. So we definitely use the schedule to determine, we want all the machines running all the time as much as possible. So if there’s a machine not running, we’ll be looking at the schedule to figure out how we can get it running and if we can have someone running machines side by side, or if there’s a long enough cycle time on one to have them running another one in cycle. So we mostly refer to that schedule to make sure we’re checking every day to make sure that the right job is on that machine, that the schedule is accurate and that we’re following it. And that we have people to put on all of those. Since we’ve gone to ProShop, we’ve actually added a second shift and a weekend shift because we definitely have work and we wanna get it running and the best way for us to do that was to start spreading our people out over more hours of the week. So good problem to have.
– Absolutely, well love to do this forever but I think we need to start wrapping things up. I’m just gonna take over and sorry for those that we didn’t get to all of your questions. Try to answer those kind of asynchronously over time. So over email maybe afterwards and we’ll reach out to you. Of course, we’ll be sending this video out but thank you Jennifer so much. Thank you, Todd. Thank you for everyone that’s on the call today. If you are interested in reaching out to Roush Yates for their contract manufacturing services you can certainly reach out to Todd. If you’re interested in learning more about ProShop of course, we’d be happy to talk to you as well. So thank you everyone again. Happy holidays coming up. Hope you have a safe, safe holiday and a good wrap up to your 2020. All right. Thanks everyone. Have a great day.
