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O’Donnell
Design
5 . The Project
5.1 eBusiness Solution
5.1.1 Business Dimension
In order to solve O’Donnell’s current communications and shop
floor control issues, the new systems had to fulfil a number of requirements:
- Provide
better, faster and more efficient internal communications.
- Provide
a reliable link with external suppliers and customers.
- Give
O’Donnell Design a presence on the web.
- Be able
to measure the production rates of items on the
factory floor (quite a challenge considering each
contract could be completely different).
- Be able
to track staff on each job ensuring maximum efficiency.
- Give
clients access to a secure client area where they could see information
pertinent to their specific jobs.
Infrastructure
Before
software development could commence, O’Donnell
needed to ensure that the IT infrastructure would meet
the needs of the new system being rolled out. The network
in place was a number of years old and was not suitable
for a growing organisation. A new network infrastructure
had to be put in place. Additionally, the company invested
in new PCs and a new server on which to run the new
systems.
Communications
In order to better streamline communications, Microsoft
Outlook was installed. Each member of staff in the office
was also given a personal email address. This meant
that:
- Internal
communications were faster and easier with a far
reduced chance of messages being lost.
- External
communications were faster – rather than having
to rely on faxes, designs would be sent to clients
via email (in Adobe Acrobat for example). Many clients
could be dealt with simultaneously and it was no
longer dictated by who got to the fax machine first!
Sending electronic files also meant that clients
were able to print them in colour and to whatever
size suited them (fax being limited to A4).
- Quick
queries could be fired to and from clients via email
saving the time and cost of a phone call.
- All communication
was infinitely more traceable both internally and
externally.
Additionally,
with personal email addresses, clients were ‘conversing’ directly
with specific people within O’Donnell and therefore a better rapport
was built between the two.
Website
The O’Donnell website (www.odonnellfurniture.com)
was developed as part of the project. Its primary function
was that of an information source allowing clients and
potential clients to see the O’Donnell Design portfolio
in addition to current work in progress. It was designed
to capture the key Unique Selling Propositions (USPs)
of O’Donnell Design – quality, integrity,
creativity and innovation. The website provides the
following information:
- Company
profile
- Current
list of clients
- Current
projects
- Portfolio
– past projects
- Personnel
– current vacancies
- Contact
details
Although the
option of a client area was part of the original specification, it was decided
that new internal systems had to be put in order before this could happen.
O’Donnell wanted to ensure that if this functionality was available
to clients, the data they had access to would be of value to them. This
functionality is still under consideration and is likely to be implemented
in the future.
Control systems on the factory floor
It was identified very early in the process that the major cost of production
was staff and not, as one might suspect, materials. Thus, it was important
to find a system that could track the hours being worked by staff and the
time put into each product in order to produce a shop floor efficiency rating.
In order to implement a full production tracking system, O’Donnell
first had to identify what the actual processes were. Without going through
this process, they would simply have been running poor quality processes
through the computer and the results would have been of equally poor quality
“If you put rubbish in you get rubbish out”, commented O’Donnell.
Initially, all the processes were mapped out on paper, stuck on the wall
of the factory floor. The Job Specification Sheet (JSS), once a hard copy
form used to work out the time a job would take to produce, was developed
in Excel ready for integration with the new software system.
Tobar Software was employed to implement Trakker, its shop floor data capture
system. Trakker broke the manufacture of each item down into its constituent
parts and, once this was done, each part was given a production time. Now,
the production manager could work out how long each part of an order took
to produce and therefore how long the total order would take to produce.
This data could also be used to:
- Identify
how staff on the shop floor could best be utilised
to give maximum efficiency.
- Better
estimate production schedules and therefore give
a good estimation of delivery times.
- Identify
bottlenecks in the system as the piece being produced
moves through the 7 process areas of the factory,
and allocate resources to minimise the impact of
those bottlenecks on production times.
One of the
easier things to implement quickly was an online system
for staff to clock in. The implementation of this new
system meant that rather than stamping a time card,
staff on the shop floor entered a three-digit code into
a computer and they were logged against a specific job.
This again assisted in tracking the efficiency of the
shop floor as the production manager was able to see
how many hours had been logged against a particular
job, how progressed that job was and therefore how efficiently
the job was being produced. If efficiency on the factory
floor fell below 75%, the management team knew there
was a problem.
Each week, data was exported from the system into Microsoft
Excel where Pivot Tables (see sidebar) were produced
allowing the management team to quickly and easily build
reports of efficiency per employee, per process or per
product.
5.1.2 Technical Dimension
Technically, the systems introduced by O’Donnell
Design were reasonably straightforward. The old network
was replaced with a CAT5e (see sidebar) standard network
providing far higher data transfer speeds around the
network and externally onto the Internet .
Into this, O’Donnell linked two PCs on the shop
floor, and eight PCs around the office, one for each
member of office staff. A Dell server was installed
to run Microsoft Outlook and the other applications
required.
A 128k ISDN line was purchased and was used to link
with external email services and the Internet . A Cisco
Hub (see sidebar) was used to link everything together.
The shop floor control system was developed using Sage,
a package best known for providing accounting software.
At the time, O’Donnell also invested heavily in
software, purchasing both Computer Aided Design (CAD)
software and a 3D design package. The purchase process
and requirements for the CAD software was straightforward
though the same couldn’t be said for the purchase
of the 3D design package. Like many SMEs in this situation,
O’Donnell Design was misled when purchasing the
product and, having spent €19,000, realised that
it didn’t meet the requirements of the organisation.
Now, rather than being an integral part of the manufacturing
process, it is simply used to put together 3D drawings
for inclusion into proposals. This obviously adds some
element of value but certainly not to the extent that
O’Donnell thought the software would.
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