Setting Industry Service Standards

Shenandoah Manufacturing, a $20 million producer of poultry-raising equipment (heaters and brooders), had been having difficulty for some time shipping orders to customers in a timely manner. They had successfully implemented a popular ERP system and had been using it for more than 3 years, yet the situation didn't improve.

Customer Service Representatives were complaining about the frequent backorders and late orders. Employees were giving it their best effort, but were frustrated, and customers were threatening to take their business elsewhere.

The company considered installing an APS system as a possible solution, but found implementation would be difficult, expensive, and running the system might be a challenging task as a number of key business practices would have to be changed. A consultant familiar with OTTO suggested they look at that product as an alternative to APS. Several OTTO aspects cited by the consultant convinced them to consider a cursorily review. Specifically:

• The non-intrusive nature of the product.
• It's relative inexpensive initial investment.
• The low overall total cost of ownership.
• The integration with their ERP system.

The initial demonstration was impressive. OTTO was installed on Shenandoah's server within 45 minutes of arrival and, most impressively, it was fully functional with their real "live" data immediately. Needless to say, the demo was well received. Even more importantly Shenandoah was able to "test drive" the software to prove its applicability before making any dollar commitments.

According to Mark Shank, Information Systems Manager, some baseline measurements were made last year, and it was determined that approximately 50% of their customer orders had shipped on time. As they began using OTTO, on-time order performance rose to 90% for the month. And Shenandoah caught up on its entire backlog and started working ahead on February's orders. In February on-time shipment performance jumped to 92% and subsequently on-time performance has ranged somewhere between 98.3% and 99.5% — well above the 96% goal set by Management.

OTTO provides the means for keeping the whole production organization focused on the few things that have to happen as the ship date approaches to get each order shipped on time. Components that have the potential for delaying an order are identified so they can be managed. Shenandoah's staff, a precious and limited resource, now concentrates on analyzing information and managing the right things at the right time rather than digging out date. To quote one production control individual: "what use to take hours now takes seconds."

According to Roy Hackett, Plant Manager: "Knowing the right things to pay attention to at the right time"

Did you know our Analytics Dashboard serves as the perfect complement to extend your MES solution?

Need real-time information regarding what shop orders are active, which lines are down, and overall OEE? Want to display all of this data in easy to understand graphs and charts with drill-down capability?

Contact us today to find out how our Analytics Dashboard can provide all of the information you need in real-time.

• MES Work Center Job Step Status
• MES Work Center Machine Status
• MES Shop Order Status
• MES Order / Operation Status
• MES Order / Parts Status
• MES Badge Status

Contact George Moroses to learn more.

Earlier this year, Ridewell Corporation inked a deal with Infor to move their BPCS 4.05 CD system to Infor LX. As part of that deal, Crossroads RMC’s MES software was selected to provide shop floor automation. 

For the ERP upgrade, Infor reached out to Crossroads RMC to provide support for both Finance and Data Conversion due to our positive track record with 4.05 CD to LX migrations. Crossroads RMC has extensive migration experience and developed a methodology for converting legacy 4.05 CD GL into CEA. 

The process Crossroads RMC developed makes it cleaner, more manageable, and easy to embrace from the client perspective. Infor also engaged Crossroads RMC to provide technical support to manage the data conversion, utilizing the Infor utilities and converting Ridewell’s 4.05 CD data to standard LX.

Attributes are the fields you define in your System i file.

You can begin by building your attribute list in Integrator by synchronizing the object with the host. This process reads the file definition from the System i and builds your list of attributes. The synchronize process will automatically run and read the definitions for the first occurrence of this file name within the library list. You can repeat this process manually multiple times if you change the file definition on the host by using the ‘Synchronize with Host’ option. However, the synchronization process will not recognize changed field names.

Non on key field attributes: The integrator requires a unique key for each object. If the host file already has a key, the synchronization process will automatically identify fields as part of the key as well as add a sequence number to multiple key parts. If the file does not have a unique key, you must either create a keyed logical file or identify the key manually. Key fields are the default sort order for all list views for an object.

“Our priorities change daily. It’s important to manage the priorities instead of having someone here in the office constantly expediting. We don’t want to run MRP every day, that would just introduce nervousness, all plans and priorities are likely to change and the flood of recommendations would be unmanageable. We run MRP once a week and rely on OTTO to track the constantly shifting priorities day-to-day.”  
Production & Inventory Control Manager, Top U.S. Crane Manufacturer

Learn More About OTTO

Standard Analytics Dashboard Views: 

• Sales Bookings (ECH)
• Accounts Receivable (RAR)
• Accounts Payable (APH)
• Planned Orders (KFP)
• Purchasing (HPH)
• Shop Order Material (FMA)
• Shop Order Operations (FOD)
• CEA
• Order Booking (ECS)
• Labor History (FLT)
• Sales History (SIH)
• Material Status (IIM/ILI)

Click Here to Learn More

If you’re not able to see everything that happens on your shop floor in real-time, you’re at a HUGE competitive disadvantage! Your competitors are running MES. 

Crossroads MES software provides:

• A user-friendly interface and an easy exchange of information between the shop floor users and your ERP database. 
• Planners the ability to schedule work to a specific machine or work area. In addition, it allows for work to be re-sequenced and split for better flexibility in scheduling shop floor activities.
• Factory workers with the ability to receive the work schedule electronically as well as interacting with it by reporting transactional activity.
• The ability to electronically display Drawing, Process Instructions, and Quality Instructions so you can eliminate, or minimize, the need for some of the paper on the shop floor.
• The ability to pass shop floor transactional activity to dashboard displays as well as the ERP system. 

Click here to learn more about Crossroads MES 

or Contact Anthony Etzel today to learn more.

In a scenario where performing job A depends on the result of job B, it is hard to decide at what time job A must be scheduled, and how long job B runs. To handle dependent jobs, you can now create a job group. Use the Job Groups (ttaad5140m000) session to create a job group. A job group has a name, with the same characteristics as a job name, and a description. The Status and User of the job group are handled automatically.

After creating the job group, the jobs are added to the group, approximately in the order the jobs must be performed. The first job in the group (with the lowest Group Number) determines the handling of the whole job group, such as execution date and whether the job group is being repeated. If the job group is not repeating, the job group and all non-repeating jobs in the job group are deleted when the job group has run.

The dependencies of the jobs in the job group are also determined. A job in the job group can only depend on a job in the same job group with a lower job number.

You can use the specific options in the Job Groups (ttaad5140m000 andttams5640m000) sessions to change the status of the job group. The job group statuses have the same meaning as the status of the jobs and the same status changes are allowed.

Note: Job groups are only handled by the BSE service Job Scheduler Service.