Situation
Operations Manager for a leading manufacturer of electronic operator interface solutions, including switches, optical encoders, joysticks, keypads, custom front panels, and panel computers that are used in the agriculture, construction, defense aerospace, medical, automotive and electronics industries.
Critical issue
The Operations Manager lacked timely access to critical business metrics such as monthly goals for sales, gross profit margin, on-time deliveries and first pass yield targets. This made it difficult to meet production goals while maintaining quality.
Reason
The company had critical data in its ERP system (AS400), but getting it into a useful format required special queries and massaging the results in a spreadsheet. This was too cumbersome and took too much time, so it didn’t get done. Lack of timely information about fundamental business performance severely hampered the manager’s ability to make good business decisions.
Vision
The Operations Manager wanted to turn on his computer every morning and review a daily dashboard of his company’s critical business metrics. He wanted this dashboard to be generated automatically. He wanted to be able to drill into this dashboard to get to more detailed information about his business.
Hertzler Systems provided
The customer worked with QualiFine Inc., an authorized Hertzler Integration Partner, to build a solution. Every night (and any other time the manager asks for it), GainSeeker® Suite queries data from the company’s AS400-based ERP system. These queries are summarized in GainSeeker Dashboards, and displayed on the manager’s desktop. The manager can drill into these dashboards and view control charts, Pareto charts, or other appropriate visualization tools as needed.
Results
According to the manager, “One screen gives me a snapshot of where my business is at and the satisfaction level of my customers. We make over a hundred shipments a day and can’t possibly monitor each one… The computer tracks those shipments and highlights any issues or problem areas. With just a couple mouse clicks I can see exactly where I’m at in terms of monthly goals for sales, gross profit margin, on-time deliveries, and first pass yield targets.”
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