Project - ERP Project - Review Processes and Reduce Operating Costs

Later in my stay at Richards-Wilcox, my position continued to evolve and I became more involved in daily operations. Through my being exposed to the various departments in the company I noticed that most of the purchasing, reporting, and production scheduling was processed in Excel rather than the ERP. This was frustrating users, as it was time consuming, there was a lot of data duplication, and the collective knowledge level in Excel was not evenly distributed throughout the user base. Understanding that the user base was not really using the ERP to its full benefit, I decided to work with the various department heads to ensure best use of the ERP.

Goals:

I worked with the team to reduce time spends and errors made processing credits, returns, and replacement products. I created a 'flowchart' for the team to follow that outlined the criteria and procedures supporting the issuing of a credit, return, or the provision of replacement panel. I outlined those individuals needing to provide authorization, and the information that would need to be provided. We also referenced any documents that needed to be filled out, and provided ERP screen shots, helping those less familiar process requests more easily through the system.  This helped with on-boarding new staff.

Improved customer relations by licensing a CRM that was integrated into our ERP and capable of tracking all customer communications and customer contact information. It was easier to manage the release of bulletins after I created custom customer groupings (using custom form fields in the CRM) and created reports to generate the email distribution lists. The system would capture the sending of the email to the distribution group, and then record which of the individuals received the bulletin. This new procedure greatly simplified on-boarding of both new customers and employees (well documented procedures and information sharing).

I worked with Accounting to simplify GL Coding in the ERP so that we could use the Integrated GL feature, which automatically creates GL entries from the individual transactions (high-volume reconciliations). This eliminated the need to run Distribution reports during Month End, which were taking upwards of four hours to run as they kept crashing (due to the number of transactions and the size of the database).

I eliminated the need to manually record time cards in the ERP by implementing a 'real time' shop floor labor and WIP recording system. This provided real-time visibility into WIP, which assisted in determining scheduling requirements, and reduced overtime requirements. This was one of the rare times I was allowed to more precisely understand the full ROI of my work effort - and I was advised that the payback for this system was within a six month period.

Eliminated costly form documents, eliminated storage requirements, and reduced the time spent managing documents by integrating a printing application and a data collection application into the ERP. Reform was used to reformat and re-direct prints. Laserfiche sent documents electronically, link chained documents (customer PO, order acknowledgment, etc.), and archive them in a search-able format. Only the production documents and original PO needed to be manually scanned in. These efforts greatly simplified information retrieval and reduced time spends communicating details to customers, as all of the information relative to incoming orders (customer po, acknowledgments), production / manufacturing documents (not prior archived), shipping, invoices, and proformas were all readily available in electronic format to the Customer Service Team.  As we no longer needed to store these documents in paper form, an office was freed.

In the ERP, company specific information can be stored in Custom Fields which can be grafted into the various screens and in reports. I used Custom Fields throughout the ERP storing customer, supplier, items, sales orders, and work in progress information in the support of all above mentioned enhancements.

It should be noted that the cumulative result of each of these independent projects / tasks result in the ability for individuals to have increased vision over combined company efforts. For instance, the combination of the above mentioned efforts provide the ability for someone to rather easily track order progression throughout manufacturing and have full visibility over all customer communications (including shipping), right from the desktop. For example: when creating a job, production scheduling could enter the associated sales order number. This, combined with the real-time Shop Clock reporting, provided an ability for sales to see how the order was progressing on the shop floor. All of the customer communications could be viewed via the Laserfiche search system. Purchasing and Accounting efforts could be reviewed via the ERP.