Medical Equipment Manufacturing:

Situation:
A national manufacturing firm of medical grade and commercial grade plastic tubing had recently migrated to a major ERP package. However, the new ERP package did not produce reports that were vitally needed in the areas of scrap materials and late shipment reports. Not having these reports had a major impact on their ability to become ISO 9000 certified, and affected their profit margins.

Critical issue:
The manufacturing firm was in the process of acquiring a competitive firm, which would double their size. The lack of these reporting applications would also affect the acquired company and have an effect on their profit margins, as several of their large customers got reduced rates if the manufacturing firm shipped late.

Reasons:
The new ERP package was working well in other areas except for tracking late shipments and scrap materials. Both of these measurements had contractual affects on the amount of material that their clients would buy from them, as well as affecting the manufacturing firms drive to become and maintain ISO 9000 certification. These items had to be addressed, and quickly.

Vision:
The client told us he needed a way to capture the amount of scrap material that was produced for each specific run on their manufacturing lines, by customer, by materials used, and cost. They also needed to track shipment dates of when promised versus when shipped, affecting their ability to adhere to JIT practices.

Solution:
Metasystems, formerly Berish & Associates, took an in depth look at their manufacturing process work flow and recommended the development of several small but effective software applications that would capture the data they needed, on a real time basis, produce the required reports and archive the data for historical purposes.

Result:
In the matter of a few short weeks the initial application was completed and put into production. The results were evident from the first shift that the application was used in the plant. Over the next several weeks the other applications were developed, tested and put into production and the client is now getting the information they need on a timely basis and is using those reports to make management and production decisions