System to support the distribution of manufacturing documents
Problem definition:
Years ago, when technical drawings were still distributed in paper form, I developed a system that automatically prepared the drawing distribution and received a company bonus of DM 5,000 for its invention and implementation.
Task:
65 possible departments could obtain 20 possible drawing types in different quantities
Each distribution included a summary information sheet containing the reason for the distribution and other information
Depending on the type of distribution, type of drawing and department, there were different quantities for drawings and information sheets
In the event of changes, further considerations of production planning had to be carried out on the basis of ERP data (e.g. stock levels and ranges of coverage). Processing was completely manual and certain steps were not carried out due to a lack of capacity
The drawing numbers affected by the change were handwritten on the info sheet by the development department
The production planning department had to manually search for all the data from the ERP-system (often 100 or more parameters) and enter it into the development documents. This usually did not take place.
Determining the respective number of photocopies was very complicated, andonly a specialist could do this. The company had to deal with major delays if the specialist was on vacation or fell sick.
Situation before:
A very time-consuming and error-prone manual process.
Situation afterwards:
The drawing numbers affected by the change were entered into my Filemaker application by the development department. Immediately, my system automatically determined the affected article numbers, production tools, the stock levels of the articles at all storage locations as well as their manufacturing costs and the respective range of each article.
This information was clearly displayed and the developers were able to make immediate decisions on how to handle stock levels if, for example, a high range of coverage would have meant that the urgent change would not have been launched on the market for months. In such a case, the development team could immediately estimate the costs and instruct the stock to be scrapped.
As the system was designed to "learn", it was able to pre-fade the drawing types over time, which otherwise had to be manually selected from a value list during initial distribution. The number of copies per department was calculated automatically. The total print quantity was displayed and the photocopies were made. Then, with an adjustable waiting time for each department, the number of copies to be placed in each mailbox was announced via loudspeaker on the PC. Special cases were indicated by an acoustic signal. From then on, this could also be done by unskilled workers. The result was a substantially accelerated and more secure process with great cost savings.