[Helder22]

I need your input here gents,

I have a relatively small company that makes decorative panels, doors, gates etc. out of plasma cut sheet steel (take a look at Arquitetura | Decoração | HS Precisão - Metal Design to get an idea of what I mean). The company has grown from a 2 man operation to about 20 people in about 3 years, which is great, but the whole thing has become extremely hard to manage. We typically have about 20 jobs running at any given time. No two jobs are alike, all have different sizes, designs, colors etc. We make anything from cutting one off parts for custom bike builders to several hundred square foot decorations for sides of buildings. a lot of the work is starting to get delivered late and more and more mistakes are happening.

The process usually goes something like this (although its never really this simple):
1. Sales guys ask one of the designers to render, photoshop a job for the customer/architect so they can visualize what they getting. Sometimes, depending on the size (price) of the job a few alternatives are presented.
2. Measurements are taken, blueprints are made, and final design layouts are sent to customers for approval.
3. We plasma cut the sheets
4. Sheets are usually sent out to be bent (we dont have a metal brake yet), so drawings are made indicating bend locations, final dimensions etc.
5. Then there is a lot of welding, banging, grinding, running around looking for work orders, blueprints, and so forth, usually followed by a lot of cussing, complaining, and general despair.
6. Parts are either painted on premises or sent out to powder coat. Sometimes we have to send the parts back cause they did a crappy job. (we've bought a powder coating oven/system but it hasn't arrived yet)
7. Parts are brought back to the shop for any remaining work that has to be done.
8. We deliver the work.
9. Sometimes we have to re-do some of it.

It is becoming increasingly hard to manage all these steps and all the people involved in each step. And ever job is different.
Right now we have bunch of folders on our server with all the information from each job and that's great to keep things organised but its not enough.

I've been looking at Trello, Asana, Wrike and others like them, but although I'm sure they would help to keep everyone in the company on the same page, they all seem to lack a certain something that I cant quite put my finger on yet.

Any ideas? I need to figure this out ASAP. I should have done this MONTHS ago....

Helder

[CNCWayToGo]

hope this helps

https://www.getapp.com/p/sem/product...yAAEgIq2_D_BwE

[the_catalyst]

The Monday.com sugested by CNCWayToGo is being advertised a lot lately, but I haven´t start the trial to make a revies. Instead I have used MS Project and is the one I´m attached to, the Gantt diagram an assignation of resources makes it easy. You can copy a file similar to the one that you need to manage, modify dates and resources and it´s done.

hope this helps

https://www.getapp.com/p/sem/product...yAAEgIq2_D_BwE

[peteeng]

Hi Helder - Where you are at is that you require a MRP or ERP system. Material or Enterprise Resource Planning. There are many around. The systems you mention are more project management systems. Do some research on ERP's. Peter

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterp...ource_planning