Remember the 1992 Presidential Debates with Ross Perot’s comment about the “Giant Sucking Sound” of manufacturing jobs being sucked out of America to Mexico? That is the short version of how vital it is for America to be able to be competitive on all levels in manufacturing.
It is not enough to have the most innovative products and flashy marketing; companies need to be able to consistently produce finished goods, on time, at the lowest cost and highest quality possible.
And that’s where efficient production scheduling assumes a major role. Transforming the raw materials into finished goods quickly and efficiently.
President of User Solutions, Inc.
SourceForge recently caught up with Jim Convis, President of User Solutions, Inc., to talk about the current manufacturing landscape and discuss the business benefits of efficient and flexible production scheduling.
First and foremost, can you please share with us a brief overview of your company? When was User Solutions established and what are your goals? Who are the brains behind the company?
User Solutions was founded in 1991 as a spin off from Lotus Development Company (remember Lotus 1-2-3?). The initial product was Lotus @Factory – which was simply a way to use a spreadsheet, with various templates and add-ons, to address manufacturing issues. We already know the spreadsheet was the de facto tool production schedulers and the like were using to help manage their operations, it was just that there was a huge gap in the skills and results in configuring a spreadsheet to meet specific goals.
Our goals, our vision, the brains behind the company, are all in our name – User Solutions. Instead of the ‘standard’ approach for developing software of hiring consultants, or internal brain storming, or daydreaming about what WE thought the industry needed, we simply listened to our customer base, one customer at a time, and added the specific features THEY needed, but added it in a way that others could easily enable. This resulted, over 30 years, in an extremely flexible and robust platform that could be applied across a wide spectrum of industry. And that same approach continues today.
In short this means that our solutions fit companies the way THEY operate, instead of vice versa. A solution that fits how they work, with familiar screens, requires less training and is much quicker to implement.
What is most interesting is our initial goal was to serve the smaller manufacturing market, the ones that would NEVER consider a higher end ERP solution due to exorbitant initial costs and complicated ongoing maintenance. But then, we found that the bigger companies that had already invested in ERP Systems had this HUGE gap in managing production scheduling and were resorting to manual spreadsheets, that frankly, got out of hand very quickly and usually resorted to only one person being able to operate them.
Serving bigger companies to fill in the production scheduling gap has turned out to be our biggest market. We still love to help the smaller enterprises though!
What industries do you serve and who are your current customers?
That’s a great question and one we have paid consultants thousands of dollars to try to figure out, all to NO avail on being able to target our ‘ideal’ market. In short, it is ANY company that needs to become more efficient in managing ANY mix of resources – be it Materials, Workcenters, Machines, and of course Labor. Our industries range from Job Shops, RailCar Repair, Printing, GE Jet Engine Manufacturing, Standard Manufacturing of all types, Process Industries, Construction, Industrial Machinery, even GE Healthcare Consultant Groups and many more. We even have customers, for example Peter Albrecht Company, that have 3 employees on the shop floor to manage. We have an Amish woodshop making standard and custom furniture, a custom van conversion shop, a construction company building modular, stackable, apartments for NYC Highrise, all the way to providing a solution for Sandia National Laboratories, major Pharmaceutical company, and managing maintenance for 400 sailors which was once the largest active Aircraft Carrier in the world – the USS Nimitz.
What exactly is Production Scheduling Software and how does it work? What makes it important for modern enterprises? Simply put – it is efficiently managing the lowest hanging fruit – staging materials when and where needed (JIT), having exactly the labor required, and no more, and no or minimal overtime, and running the most efficient machines/workcenters, and knowing when to outsource, all in order to deliver excellent customer service at the lowest possible operational cost. Being able to quote accurate lead times to customers and then deliver efficiently is critical for sustained success.
It seems that ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) claims to manage operations from start to end – why is production scheduling such a gap?
In many cases, the original design for ERP originated from the accounting needs of an organization, not the production floor. In other cases, ERPs are designed for a particular market segment – for example make to order or make to inventory. However, we have seen a cataclysmic shift in the globalization of manufacturing and it’s extremely rare to find an organization that fits a specific model. Yes, the accounting side might still work but the production scheduling will not fit most ERPs and that leaves the schedulers to manage best on their own. Problem is, the complexity of efficient production scheduling is beyond the reach for most personnel and efficiency suffers though ordering and storing extra materials, scheduling overtime, and the like.
According to Research, many ERP and Production Scheduling applications fail, why is this and how does User Solutions address this dilemma?
There is quite a bit of rigidity in most ERPs. The choice during implementation usually breaks down to trying to adapt their operations to how ERP wants to do it, or spend a lengthy time and expense trying to adapt the ERP to a specific application. That usually leads to customers losing heart and confidence and once that happens, it’s extremely challenging to end up with a successful implementation.
Add to that the constantly changing business and environment changes (think pandemic) and a good solution even one year ago is now near obsolete.
Our Secret Sauce is instant flexibility and the ability to adapt to the current environment – quickly and easily. In a nutshell, we offer a VERY affordable “Shrink wrap – ‘custom’ solution” that can be reconfigured on the fly to solve new challenges, new operations, new products.
How can we do this? It’s a two-part answer. First, the core of our solutions is by having a powerful, yet flexible scheduling solution (Resource Manager-DB, RMDB) that can incorporate 90% of business rules so that you have a pretty viable schedule right out of the gate. There are over 25 years of customer driven enhancements incorporated into RMDB. RMDB includes the ability to adapt to new models, such as working with a summary or detailed routing, can be uploaded and implemented in a flash with our flexible, easy, and powerful import and export capability.
Secondly, then, we apply our EDGE (Enhanced Drag and Drop Graphical Environment) which is an intuitive and graphical display of schedule and allows users to tweak to react to day to day events as necessary. Someone didn’t show up? Machine broke down? A new job has become the highest priority? All as simple as moving a post it notes from on part of ‘white board’ to another. Then, EDGE automatically reconciles with RMDB AND hosts ERP all in the background. In most cases, EDGE is all the customer interacts with and in essence, this lets RMDB take the grunt work out, and lets planning people USE THEIR BRAINS on a visual, intelligent, ‘white board’ for any\all exceptions that matter.
What can a typical customer expect in terms of implementation time, costs, and ROI?
This is where User Solutions has a unique, virtually foolproof approach. As part of our sales process, we listen intently to exactly what challenges and issues our customers are having. Then, we examine their current data to determine if it is close enough to be able to drive a production scheduling system directly (routings with correct timings, etc.).
Finally, we offer to prototype the solution, risk free, integrating with their data and producing the result. We can only do this because of the ease of integrating existing data and easily filling any blanks. We do this all during the sales process, recording sessions, etc., summarizing approach, in a sense proving it all out before any commitment! No PowerPoint dog and pony show. Just the real thing.
While we have some simple solutions in Excel for a few hundred dollars, by the time we end up tweaking the RMDB-EDGE application and providing customer interfaces and reports, the typical implementation time and costs are around 3 months and $25K.
Our typical customer enjoys an ROI of around 10X per year, that is every year. This is in terms of hard savings on inventory carrying costs, labor staffing, increased throughput without additional expense, as well as soft costs for improved customer service.
One example of an amazing ROI is GE Capital managing 200,000 railcars that each produced $20/day in lease revenue. Before they started with the US, they were averaging 70% efficiency in terms of scheduling repairs and taking cars offline. After working with the US, we improved that to over 95% efficiency which resulted in an extra 150,000+ days for available leasing – or $300,000+ in extra revenue.
It’s easy to be confused with all the various acronyms in this space – exactly where does User Solutions fit in terms of MRP-Material, MRPII-Resources, ERP-Accounting, APS, MES, SCADA, JIT.
Good question. We cross over all areas and let the customer define what is important to them. We have customers asking for MRP (Material Requirements Planning) and end up really needing MRPII (MRP plus Resources) plus APS (Advanced Planning and Scheduling which is simply scheduling more complex environments). Regarding ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), we have used RMDB to help model the functionality required for larger companies evaluating standard high end ERP solutions, as well as fulfilling the needs for ERP for smaller companies. It’s important to note that we don’t do accounting but can integrate with most. Our smaller companies, who are using RMDB as their “ERP” also might have QuickBooks, Sage (PeachTree), etc., as their core accounting solution. Now, Just In Time(JIT) is a simple by-product from the design of RMDB. Most all manufacturing software systems require a routing separate from Bills-Of-Material. Based on feedback from customers, this NEVER occurred to us – so we designed a BOR (Bills of Resource) that allows the user to configure ANY mix of resources (labor/workcenters/machines) in any order so you can stage materials at exactly the point in the process where needed – in other words, Just In Time.
Finally, regarding MES (Manufacturing Execution System) industry had to introduce a new acronym to ‘claim’ a new technology that has been mostly around for years Supervisorial Control and Data Acquisition – SCADA. MES simply is the ability to automatically connect to the factory floor to get a more real time view of what’s going on. How many pieces have been made by the presses, which ones are down, etc., which are all vital imports into production scheduling systems. Now, in years gone by, this was a difficult task with all the propriety communication drives for different equipment – but more and more this data can be immediately updated to standard SQL Tables on the server. Making it a piece of cake to interface with Production scheduling Systems.
Can you provide us with sample use cases for User Solutions?
We have several current clients that have implemented ERP but in a piecemeal fashion, where each area of the factory has its own BOM, own Routing, own Orders and they are manually trying to manage each individually. For these clients, we created an end-to-end BOR (Bill Of Resource) and can automatically synchronize all departments due to capacity and inventory constraints. They did NOT have to adjust the ERP—we just came along and filled in the gaps.
Another client uses RMDB to load weekly demands and hires temp labor to meet demand.
Duracell used RMDB for long term plant capacity planning, where and when and how to add additional plants over a 5 year period.
Still another loads demand for skills and utilizes resultant reports to strategically cross train employees where the demand is greatest.
I would say that all of our clients use RMDB to be able to quote accurate lead times, then meet them, for their clients.
Looking into the future, what are some market trends or technologies you see on the rise and how do you plan to meet them?
More of the same – customers with ERP with gaps and some way to fill and gain a competitive advantage. How can we do this?
What is truly unique is User Solutions still have the same developers and we are constantly improving the software to meet specific customer’s needs.
For those NOT in the software business, this is a HUGE deal. Software development is an art. To lose the original developer, then ask another to pick it up, most cases they will NOT care to be supporting someone else’s program. It is akin to having Picasso paint half a painting then asking Vincent Van Gogh to finish it. Not going to happen – he would start from scratch. Which takes more time and will NOT resemble the other painting! We are very fortunate to have the same developers and can support all source code directly for the foreseeable future.
About User Solutions
User Solutions, Inc. was founded in 1991 in response to the demand for lower cost, easy to learn and use software solutions for the manufacturing and operations management markets. As either an add-on solution to existing ERP solutions, or running stand alone, their affordable planning, scheduling, and tracking solutions are known for great flexibility, rapid implementation and increasing the knowledge and skill set of those involved with the production process.
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