Brad and Jon discuss the trials and tribulations of scheduling over Jon career building a successful cabinet company. From Note pads to High tech software solutions.
The similarity of challenges in this business is quite astounding, it gives a new definition to 'headless chicken' . I have seen similar challenges in several countries in Africa and India. All workshops start with an excel worksheet but as the volumes grow you must incorporate a good combination of ERP/CRM software that ties all planning loose ends. This with a combination of follow up visits to site and phone calls can help manage unnecessary overhead costs. Brought about by overstaffing, poor space management, poor time management, excess handling and damages, poor cash flows, unreliable deliveries, disjointed procurement. Without which the growth of your business becomes stunted. Great discussion gentlemen. Welcome to Kenya, Africa.
Thanks Brad and John, awesome podcast and very timely, one of our challenge is is scheduling and this answered a lot of questions abs have me good insite.
Great discussion. We are in a very similar point in our journey, we have started to use dedicated software for planning and scheduling, (Just Plan It); however, it is stand alone and does not communicate directly with our other systems for: material procurement, design / drawings, etc. What software are you using? I heard a mention of Synapse in the video but that appears to be more of a warehouse management tool that has functionally to integrate with other ERP systems.
I'm sure this will be a great podcast. But please get better audio! If I can be of any help let me know. Sounds like the microphones were not recording and the laptop across the room was lol.
Well, I was STOKED as soon as I read the title... struggling with scheduling and was really hoping to have some secrets revealed. Unfortunately the secret isn't easy... it's just continuous improvement. For small shops like mine, assuming lean is happening, are there any small but significant tips to improve scheduling flows? A breakdown of critical "must haves" from a data standpoint would be awesome. To put it another way, what is the "right-er" way to think about process design for scheduling?