Above: [METALWARE USERS] ALREADY HAVE THE DATA THEY NEED, BUT THEY MIGHT NOT KNOW HOW TO TWEAK IT, PULL IT OUT AND UNDERSTAND IT.KEVIN DIX, PARAGON CONSULTING SERVICES INC.

November 2022- Database powers visualization tools that help companies spot trends and make better decisions more quickly.

Obvious statement alert: Managers are busy. To keep their finger on the pulse of the many functions going on throughout the organization, they want reports. The issue: They barely have time to read them, whether the reports are about incoming orders, costs per part, man hours per shift, inventory turns, or any other piece of information. So one objective should be to produce reports that reflect activity in real time and that are presented more graphically so that a manager doesn’t have to pore through three pages of 10-point type to get to the information she can really use.

A larger issue is that ERP/software systems, linking every department and their various tasks, gather a huge amount of data that can and should be analyzed and leveraged in order to make good decisions. Yet a lot of people are—again—very busy and don’t know how to capture, analyze and present the information without going through a daunting amount of employee and management training and time.

One way to pull it all together is to hire an outside consultant who will help the company work more effectively with the software systems already in place.

Paragon Consulting Services Inc., York, Pennsylvania, developed three software systems: Metalware, MetalNet and MetalWeb. Metalware automates tasks for creating quotes, entering orders, controlling inventory, processing material, purchasing, trafficking, invoicing and accounting. MetalNet links software capabilities in the cloud. MetalWeb allows authorized customers to request quotes and enter orders online.

Customers can retrieve statements, invoices and MTRs and make payments online. Paragon also performs a host of IT services, including helping clients figure out how to access and use information.

Kevin Dix, a Paragon consultant, joined the company earlier this year after working for a large Midwest metals distributor and processor for seven years. At that company, he worked in sales for a spell and then went down a rabbit hole. Dix discovered the company had untapped reporting potential. “I spent a lot of time looking at the back end of Metalware and helped the organization develop a reporting standard,” including metrics such as KPIs for tracking sales over time, production, manufacturing scheduling and machine utilization rates.

THEORY VERSUS PRACTICE

While at his previous job, Dix studied the company’s employee time records, material consumption, scrap output, on-time deliveries and material planning. That includes “which items turn fastest, what standard line card items to stock, and how to stock them for the sake of better planning and forecasting.” This information helps both sales and purchasing, Dix says.

He moved even deeper into the Metalware system, using data to create better reports.

Metalware users “already have the data they need, but they might not know how to tweak it, pull it out and understand it,” he says. “Some companies only use a fraction of the data they capture. Some don’t even know that they can.” Dix and others at Paragon work with customers “to use other areas of the software and capitalize on the knowledge they can gain.”

MANAGING DATA

Paragon encourages clients, especially those who use Metalware, to utilize their data visualization tools powered by Charts.JS or add-on tools such as Microsoft’s Power BI or Tableau for more advanced reporting systems/analytics. “At Paragon, we’re creating our own dashboard,” Dix says. “Customers want to touch the data themselves, and they don’t want canned reports. Having back-end data you can make useful visualizations out of is important.”

MANUFACTURING COST PER PART

Clients want to capture data “during the process, not after the process is done. You waste time by entering the data later. Especially when you’re analyzing things live,” he says.

One of the key tasks is material planning so that purchasing can improve inventory turns. The tools provide a better visualization of how inventory was consumed over time, and which stock items are trending over a given period. For example, one client found that “a lot of its inventory consumption was seasonal,” says Dix, “but they purchased material based on the previous three months’ demand rather than for the season.”

After using the visualization tools, the purchasing team was able to forecast that consumption would come down in winter, then rise in spring. “That’s easier than looking at a printout report without visualizations,” Dix says.

With Metalware’s back-end data, “you can keep all that and can report on many different aspects of the business.” In the production environment, for example, one client paid close attention to machine utilization and which jobs were profitable versus which were not, according to Shawne O’Connor, director at Paragon CSI. As a result, the company “reorganized the machine floor plan to streamline the ins and outs of the production floor, and then purchased new equipment that made more sense. They expanded to new types of cutting processes,” purchasing an automatic cutof lathe to replace older band saws. Its processes became “significantly faster, and the company produced less scrap,” she says.

IMMEDIACY

By using the software and the visualization tools together, customers “can also highlight specific data to bring attention to the most important information in the reports. The reports are not only looking at last week but the last 24 hours,” Dix says. “Having real-time data available is super important to make the visualizations even more vital.”

Part of what Paragon does is to “show customers how to leverage their data to drive business decisions and create data views.” This is interactive and malleable. “We work with our clients to identify the most important metrics that they need analyzed, then use their feedback for creating custom reports.”

Metalware is mobile, too. “We provide the ability to gather data through a mobile scanning tool, a barcode label, for example. “Everything in the environment has a label that can be scanned,” Dix says. This means that “the moment a sheet or coil is allocated to an order, you know that it’s happened. Other systems may not know that material is spoken for until after the job is done.”

OUT THE DOOR

Metalware gives users the ability to plan ahead on loads, and when they scan a shipping tag to the load manifest, it immediately shows in the system that the truck has been loaded.

The sales department can capture tracking codes in real time. “If a customer calls and says, ‘I need a status on my order,’ the sales team can report in real time whether the material has been allocated, is late or has been scanned onto the truck. It also captures signatures at the delivery site,” Dix says.

“The system is simple enough that a job shop that doesn’t want to use every single function can still get great reporting, but it is robust enough to scale up with your business as it grows, and track additional processes. If you are building additional steps within your company, the system can accommodate that.” -MM