FileMaker in Manufacturing
This manufacturing project was started by two in-house
staff members. After some initial success in automating the work
of the graphics
department, the in-house team ran into some roadblocks in automating
the more
complex manufacturing areas of the company. I was brought in to
help move the project forward.
Working together with the in-house team and managers, we were
able to create a system that captures the complexity of their manufacturing
process to get the project back on track. Because we were generating
a positive return on investment for the company, the system grew
to cover most of the company processes, up to the hand-off to the
accounting system, and eventually expanded to more than 72 tables
covering
the following departments:
- Graphics
- Customer Service
- Manufacturing (in all its many aspects)
- Purchasing
- Resource Costing
- Inventory
- Shipping (integrated with EDI)
Two of the big challenges of this project:
- Carefully making changes to a pre-existing system in constant use
- Managing a project with more than 200 sub-projects and, at times,
as many as 10 active sub-projects
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