e) In-House Production
STEEL MANAGER III metal industry software has been designed to link any production processing directly to the sales entry process, ensuring that any required processing is scheduled and costed accordingly. This will allow Metal Service Center operators to provide their customers with accurate pricing and delivery dates.
-
Customer Part Quoting creates recipes for your customer parts including the raw material required, single or multiple machine processes, machine costs, labor and actual image file. By including Job Costing into your quote you'll see a true margin on the sale of your finished good and not just on the raw material.
-
Repeat orders on customer parts are easily processed. You can retrieve the past order and issue a new quotation with ease. Searches can be made by customer part or drawing number and sent to production with just a few keystrokes.
-
The Advanced Production Scheduler in Steel Manager III gives you total control of your shop, from assigning jobs to multiple machines, to sorting jobs by priority, customer, specification or required date
-
SM3's Split Log Function automatically determines the material required for cut jobs on long products and also determines what the remnant will be. Remnants will be automatically placed back into inventory available for sale the second you process the cutting job. Remnant costs can be re-valued, manually or automatically, based on the size of the drop.
-
Define Legs and Tails to figure out what a plate actually looks like after it has been on the table. Steel Manager III links your remnant drawing from your nesting program to the physical inventory, there's no more guess work.
Production Schedule
All approved orders will be filed in the production schedule under the machine codes of each respective process. Only the first machine will be accessible until the process is completed. Access is then available to the next machine, and so on, until all processes are complete.
Although most of the schedule is set up automatically, it will be possible to maintain certain aspects manually. Total machine time will be calculated based on cutting length, number of heads, total pierces and the unit time for each process. However, it will be possible to alter this time by modifying any one of the parameters. If a machine goes down or gets overloaded, it will be possible to transfer a job from one machine to another.
A powerful feature in Steel Manager III metals management software is the ability to sort each column on the schedule. This will allow the operator to group together jobs on different sort criteria and make effective decisions based on this grouping. For example, if the schedule is sorted on the raw material column, like products (group, size, and grade) will be grouped together. This will give the operator the flexibility to combine jobs, reduce loading time, which will in turn increase the efficiency in the workshop.
Multiple processes for one order are handled very effectively by the scheduler. Once a process has been completed, the next process in sequence will be scheduled automatically. If during machine assignment, a vendor code is attached to the process, the system will treat it as an outside process. In this case, a processing purchase order will be produced to handle the outwork. At any point during the cycle it will be possible to do an inquiry to see which processes are complete and which are outstanding.
The schedule also gives the salesperson a handle on the progress of an order, as well as the ability to inform the customer of the exact status and expected completion date of any specified job.
Production Work Order
Once the operator has "grouped" a set of jobs together, sufficient material in the form of selected tag numbers will be assigned, and an in-house production document will be created and printed for processing. This will give the production operator exact specs from the schedule without any transcription errors.
The tags will be committed to the document which will prevent any further access to the material.
Production Confirmation
On completion of the actual process, it is necessary for the production order to be confirmed. This will involve the input of the actual weight of the raw material used, and the actual weight of the finished goods yielded by the process. It will also be necessary to indicate any off-cuts and/or scrap metals.
Both scrap and off-cuts can be re-valued from their original unit cost. Any loss in value will be costed to the job and assigned to the finished good items. This will ensure no loss in value.
All finished goods will be assigned a new "child" tag number. The unconsumed raw material can be returned to stock with its original tag number, or it can be assigned a new "child" tag number. Scrap inventory will be assigned a special type of tag number. All these newly created tag numbers will be linked to the "parent" log number, ensuring complete after-the-fact traceability.
On completion of the production confirmation, the raw material will be relieved and all finished goods will update their respective item codes. In addition, the finished goods will be allocated to the appropriate order lines, indicating that they are ready to ship.
