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Fabelta launches 2 new showrooms as a result of their New Business Intelligent Product Configurator CustomBuilt360
A well known Quebec based Window & Door manufacturer since 1957 wanted to increase their sales.
The desire to open new strategically located showrooms combined with the training challenge of new a sales team due to product complexity has motivated Fabelta to implement the Suite360 solution. The result : the right balance between consolidating inventory, and increasing visibility of custom products to their customers and prospects.
Case Challenge
How can they consolidate their inventory, while maintaining easy visibility of custom products for any customer? How can they reduce the time required to compile orders and manage production and delivery?
What other methods can they use to schedule production and increase throughput without adding capacity or reducing load? How can they most effectively communicate priority changes to production? How often do they meet their commitments, but fail to meet the customer's expectations?
Best Practices
Product Configurator or Sales Configurator... can be used by companies who manufacture or sell complex products or services that have many options, choices, sizes, features, etc. Configurators such as these are used to assist users including customers to develop Product Configurations and generate Sales Order Quotes quickly and accurately with minimum efforts. Ideal for organizations that need to ensure that their sales quotations and orders contain valid Product Configuration and Sales Order Quotes. Allowing company's to leverage their engineering and sales expertise by putting this knowledge into a system that others can use in selling and ordering ensures that all the product configurations, sales configurations, order quotes, etc. that are generated are 100% accurate. Trying to keep up with the ever changing customers demands, which can really be a process in itself you need to be sure that all your dependencies are met and your requirements fulfilled before generating a quote or offer.
System Managed Inventory... should maintain on-hand quantities and values by project or customer. This will allow for a consolidated inventory, increased buying power, and simplified reporting. If implemented correctly, it can reduce residual inventory as well.
Identify Bottlenecks-Scheduling and Prioritization Methods It is critical for production to have a clear picture of load vs capacity for each work center in production. Having access to this information well in advance will allow production to adjust schedules and capacities before it becomes an issues and delays deliveries. Capacity planning systems will level the load for each work center and push out less important jobs. This makes it easy to see when all current jobs will be completed given current capacity constraints. However, it can make it difficult to identify when work centers will exceed capacity thus allowing managers to adjust capacity and increase throughput as needed. However, this method does not make it easy to identify when all current jobs will be completed without changes to current capacity unless the schedules are manually adjusted. It stands to reason that work centers and activities that are used more often and across more jobs are more likely to be the source of a bottle neck. This is typically a great place to start looking for bottlenecks and working to streamline the process. Depending on the type of component and the number of times it is placed on an assembly, material shortages can have as great or greater impact on on-time performance than capacity and load. It is important to have visibility of all parts needed for each work center and whether you currently have or will have enough on-hand in time to complete the job for any work center as scheduled. If critical components are missing, then production may need to reset priorities and schedules. It is common to push important jobs for large customers. While this may satisfy the customer, it is very likely to decrease overall on-time performance and establish a precedence the customer will want to repeat. However, it should be used sparingly and after proper consideration. If the other methods are used properly scheduling will become less of an issue and even the large customers should be able to get their orders on-time without hurting all other jobs, customers, and performance.
Material Availability will reduce the priority for any job without sufficient material on-hand to complete the job. Since some components are too difficult and/or time consuming to place late in the process, these parts can and should affect when a job is sent through each step in the process. However, many components can be placed later without significant impact to schedule or processing time required. Therefore, it is important to identify which components should and should not impact scheduling if they are missing.
Setting schedules based on due date is one of the simplest methods of scheduling. It requires little effort to maintain and each Work Center will have the priorities set automatically. However, for this method to allow for the highest possible on-time performance sales needs to confirm that sufficient capacity and lead-time are built in to the order before placing it in the queue. If the load is near capacity or the customer doesn't allow enough lead time, this method is inadequate for completing all jobs on time.
Identifying the Work Centers with the highest load and increasing the priorities on all jobs that must pass through that Work Center can increase throughput without increasing capacity. This will ensure they have as much time as possible to pass through without down time. Although this will not guarantee that all jobs will ship on time, it should increase the likelihood.
The difference between the processing time required to compete a job and the available work hours until a job is complete can be called a job's slack time. Using this method will increase a job's priority as the time required approaches the time remaining. This is a dynamic method that may increase and decrease a job's priority as it moves between work centers based on the performance of each work center. This also means that a job with less slack time, but later due date may get a higher priority. For example, a job with 3 days of actual processing time required and 7 work days until it is due will have a lower priority than a job with 10 days of actual processing required and 12 work days until it is due. This method will help ensure the highest possible on-time performance, but requires that processing and available work times are setup accurately and completely.
The 360 Solution
- Product360 combined with CustomBuiltT360 ... It integrated product list, pricing, business rules, graphic display functions, and technical specifications as well as distribution channel communication such as promotions and quality awareness. It structured the information for all configurable specifications building a unique decision tree that integrated all specific options such as exterior moldings, types of glass, dimensions, and more. Each option or choice in the decision tree had built in specific integration, display, protection, pricing and validation rules. The options interact to each situation from which they are processed instantly. A live environment enabled the catalog to create dependencies and interact among options to cover all possible scenarios that came with building complex custom-built windows and doors. Creating a controlled customization process, re-validating all choices at every step of the process generating alerts and correction alternatives...Ensuring full order conformity and process ability. The choices were clear and visual. The product rendering evolved as specifications were determined to help the customer in making the product real and tangible.Multiple views were available: top, side and elevation angles to permit critical information viewing as well as to offer technical views. Our product matrix also enabled the configurator to showcase multiple product integration to create complex structural product packages. The configurations rules automatically calculate the joint form’s moldings and structural bars to accommodate any number of combinations. CustomBuilt360 enabled us to provide intelligence to Fableta's reseller network. With CustomBuilt360, we are able to provide a great point of purchase sales solution to optimize their selling processes with a guided selling approach. When we bridged everything with BusinessCore360 ERP modules the sytem provided them all the business intelligence they required to manage all of their resources and better plan their production processes.
- Production Scheduling...Allows production managers to monitor and track a jobs progress through the production floor. Setting priorities based on free time and allowing managers to adjust those priorities as needed. It also communicates those priorities to production workers so they know the most important jobs, in their work centers, at any given time and can focus their attentions where it can do the most good. The production schedules are adjusted each day to account for the process made that day and the update priorities as needed.
- Production Capacity... This module gives immediate visibility of potential bottle necks by allowing the user to select a date (grouped by day, week, or month) and/or work center and see the capacity and load. This information is available as soon as a job is in the system and scheduled. This can provide sufficient time to adjust the schedule or the capacity as needed and maximize throughput.
- Open Work Orders... This module provides a summary of all open jobs in production and allows users to sort by WO, Customer, Due Date, and Status. It also shows the build quantity, how many are complete, and the balance. This can help production workers know which jobs are in process and when they are due.
- Work Order Shortage List... This list identifies component shortages by WO, WC, and part number. By displaying which parts are currently missing and expected delivery quantities and dates, this module helps production identify critical shortages and adjust the schedule as needed.
- Work Orders... This module allows users to enter an assembly, requested quantity, and requested date. It evaluates processing time and material availability and indicates how many can be done by the requested date.
- On-time Delivery Reporting... This screen will allow users to show on-time delivery performance for selected assemblies or customers over a selected period of time. This enables production to evaluate their current processes and process changes to see how it impacts on-time performance. Real-time reporting helps determine adjustments and improvements.
CONCLUSION
"Custom Product previews translated into higher ticket product sales cross and up selling strategies which push profit margins higher and brought closing sales time frames drastically lower. We even added two new showrooms to expand our market and give us our very own sales operation to help our product and company awareness and provide better customer service and reach."
– Sylvie O. Desroches, President of Fabelta.
As they expected and hoped, with few exceptions, they were able to achieve the level of sales and performance they wanted without rushing their orders and accruing extra man hours on each job and increasing their profits and quality.
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