Scheduling – A Real Challenge for Manufacturers

My name is Frank. Welcome to another genius webinar. Today, we’re going to be talking about scheduling, and that’s That’s a key challenge for manufacturers. Personally, I’ve been with Genius more than nine years, almost 10 now, done implementation. And like I was saying just before, I’ve been doing webinars for almost four years, almost monthly, to sometimes share with some of my other expert colleagues to come to talk about certain topics. By the way, next month is going to be about how to choose your ERP, how to implement or budget for your ERP. It’s going to be around these topics. All right. So again, welcome, everybody. Not everybody heard, so I’m going to repeat another time. If you need to talk to me, I’m not going to open the mics today. We are supposed to get about 60 attendees or so, so I’m going to keep the mics closed. But if you need to give me any comments, ask me any questions, please find the Q&A section of Zoom and write them in there.

If I don’t answer them while the session is going, we will follow up with you through email. All right, let’s get through it. Today’s agenda, we’re going to be talking, and I promise, lightly about who we are here at Genius. I see a lot of you guys, a participant, are already Genius users, so I’ll make sure to not take too much time on who we are here at Genius. Then we’ll be talking about, well, Let’s first say, why is scheduling so much of a challenge for manufacturers? And then we’ll talk about some of the existing scheduling method that are out there and which one fits your needs. It’s definitely going to be one of the major topic here. To do that, we’ll talk a little bit about what type of manufacturers are out there and which method fits their profile. And because here at genius, we are targeting mostly custom manufacturers, we’re going to insist on what solution we bring to the table for custom manufacturers. And yes, as I said, I can answer some of the questions as it goes. It should be somewhat of a short session today. It shouldn’t take the entire hour, but I will, at the end, leave you with how to get more information about scheduling.

For our existing customer, you’ll see on our platform, you’ll get a lot more information, and also to new customers, if you want to join to know more, for sure, if you want to join the family, it’d be great. But if not, there’s some books I’ll reference to as well. All right, so let’s get going. So first of all, let’s talk about who we are here at Genius. So, badges on the left, these are And we’ve got a mention that we got from different ERP selection sites. So these are websites that help people find the best ERP that suits their needs. And we’ve been getting a lot of good feedback through these different platform. On top of that, I mean, one of our top remarks that defines who we are as our customer likes us. They stick with us, they come and join, and we really have a very high retention rate. People are staying with us through the years. We’ve been in business 35 years, started working with manufacturers, doing services, and evolved to working or supplying the ERP. We’ve crossed over 130 employees about a year ago, and we’ve had more than 10,000 users of the software so far.

We’ve been keeping a continuous compounded annual growth. I think when it joined, it was somewhere close to 20, 25 %, and it kept growing. So really a rapid internal growth. What makes us unique? Well, I said it already once or twice. We’ve been working with manufacturers. That’s definitely our target. So build for custom manufacturing, that’s the first statement here. So we’re going to be talking more about users of genius are typically people that engineer, configure, make to order. You’re going to have unique products that goes out every time. To do that or to serve that target business well, we have tools like our CAD2BOM integration with some of the design software out there. We’ll be talking about scheduling today for sure. And we also have nice ways of showing up your data. We have our nice analytics that came up, what was it, two or three years ago, and we have a lot of easy way of getting your information out of the Genius ERP. All right, so promise I kept it short. 204, so less than five minutes. That’s great. Why scheduling? So first question to ask ourselves is, why do we do a webinar today for sure.

But there’s typically a concern where scheduling is just critical for any manufacturing industry. I’m reusing that little heart shape about our 96% retention. I mean, We keep our customers around, we keep them happy. That was the same thing with you guys. How do you keep your customer happy? Well, that’s typically by being in line with what you’re promising, delivering on time. But internally, there’s other reasons why we want to make sure that we do proper scheduling. We want to stay on top of things. We want to reduce as much as we can the time of each job we have to make, to make more profits for sure. But also, if you reduce the time of each job in your shop, that means you can optimize or you can better plan because there’s less concurrent activities happening in your shop. So reducing whip is definitely one of the purpose of doing proper planning. But if you have a shorter span of time for each of your job, it also has another super nice impact to reduce your inventory. So if you have a lot of job going all at once, you probably have a lot of staging happening, a lot of whip on your ground.

And because of that, you probably also have a lot on shelf or waiting to be used. So having proper planning typically will reduce that and will reduce cost. The other reason why this is still a so popular topic in our webinar today by the attendance is Well, it’s perceived that super complex and impossible to achieve. I’m going to have to say this is really something we encounter a lot of time. People think that there’s so many variables involved. It’s impossible to keep track of. Well, I can tell you there are people that achieved it, and there’s ways of keeping it simple. But that’s also the recipe. You have to keep it simple so you can actually manage it. We’ll get into that. So So I’d like to ask you a first question. Just to make sure I didn’t put anybody to sleep yet. I’m going to launch this poll, and I’ll invite you to answer. What do you think would be the answer? This is an actual survey that was launched. From people that actually have an ERP with scheduling tool, how much were able or are leveraging it today? What would be the percentage?

Again, from people that are using ERPs today, how many are able to actually leveraging it or are leveraging it? Cool. All right. I got about half of the attendance that answered my survey. Perfect. All right, I’ll close it there. It’s just to get the mindset here on the table of what do we have. Let me share the result. It should show up on screen. I don’t see it on my end, but it should be on screen for you guys. So most of you said that it’s more than 25%, then we’re saying maybe 10%. But if I group up your answers to, let’s say 25% or more, we’re hitting almost everybody here on the table, except one-third of you thinking it’s less. Most of you think that a lot of people use a lot, use it a lot. We have almost the same mindset, but we were asking our consultant. We didn’t think a lot of our customers were using our scheduling, and we found a survey that was saying exactly the same thing about the In the manufacturing industry, specifically, people using ERPs that have the tool, specifically, only 8 % were leveraging their scheduling software.

And that’s not too long ago. It’s about four or five years ago. So it was a realization for us, and it was confirming a little bit what we had suspicion about. And then it’s really what pushed us to go beyond and have better tools in our system. All right. How is it done? What’s out there? What can we use to do scheduling in the market today? Let’s tackle that question. I want to stay high level here because we could get it so granular. So I divided it in two techniques. There’s the traditional scheduling, and there would be… Let me play with word a little bit here. Let’s call it project scheduling. All right. And I’ll describe quickly both of them. If we go into traditional scheduling, scheduling. Basically, it’s called M-E-S often, and we’re going to call that manufacturing execution system. And it really based itself on every task that you have to do, having a recipe basically to do your product. So what does it consist of? The first thing I’d like to say about this is I’ve studied in industrial engineering, and this is what was taught to me. Teachers love math, so there was a lot of math involved.

There was a lot of conditioning and statistics involved. But to do that, you want to have precise variables that you can use. You didn’t want to guess variables or leave them out there without any conclusion. So this type of method is taught because we know the variables. So if I move forward to what do we need to make this happen? The first thing is you need a bill of manufacturing. You need routing step. You need to have your recipe already defined. So there’s a quick example here. If If I make, for example, an equipment, and I need to go an assembly step, testing and shipping, you can see the duration here with the blue lines that are lining up to a schedule. So having the proper step of fabrication with time involved to each of the steps. That’s the requirement, and that’s how it works. So now we have the sequence of tasks. You got to know the times. In a lot of project, it’s not the case. Let’s just say I’ll keep the reason for why to use or not to use later. But traditional scheduling requires this. The other thing that typically happens in traditional scheduling, if you have bigger bills, like sub-assemblies that come together into a final assembly, you’ll need to have multi-level bond dependencies, meaning that, for example, here, if you look at my little snapshot at the bottom left, if you have a sub-item that needs to be fabricated to be assembled together into the top item, well, that needs to have some conditioning or certain dependencies.

The bottom one has to be built first to be able to build the top one. Material requirement. All right. Already, you can see that perhaps some of the ERPs out there will not align material with your scheduling. I’ll put it in there because the way I was taught, and most of the ERPs I’ve seen will do it, there might be higher tier ERP that I’ve worked with. So in this case, you can see how genius manages it, but it’s pretty much what I’ve seen around the table, too. We are seeing how routing tasks are lining up to required material. Now, what you probably need to know that won’t be discussed if you start doing scheduling and everything. I’ve learned the hard way is, it was my first mentor that got me in through knowing this, there’s still a university out there in the US that will give a million dollar price if you can solve the key infinite rule or something like that. Basically, what we’re trying to say is if you schedule, you know when your material is required. But you need to know when you get your material to be able to schedule And there you have your infinite loop that just can’t be solved.

There’s always a variable that depends on the previous variable. It’s a little bit like doing an infinite loop or reference in an Excel file where you just can’t reference a cell to each other in a formula. Same condition here. So typically in ERP, what you’ll find when they support this type of process is you can go in a pull mode or in a push mode. In this case, what you’re seeing is the pull mode where we’ve worked from a a target date where we need to deliver, worked our schedule backward to get to a point where I know exactly where I need my material to be in-house. So that’s a pull mode. My schedule drives when I need my component. Now in push mode, you can actually say, wait until I get material and then start your schedule. So again, that can only happen in forward scheduling. I’m hoping it hits home here. So there’s a huge nuance that mathematically, it’s just not possible to go pool mode and have your schedule dependent on your material arriving, except if you do multiple iteration of your schedule and material planning. All right, so let’s If a material requirement, I could go on.

So if I summarize here, what is traditional scheduling? We’re talking about it’s a method that’s taught in your university. And I guess the reason why I bring this up, I should say it. I’ve encountered this a lot where we get into a manufacturing facility, and there are certain employees that come from other manufacturing facility, or like me, came from industrial engineering and think they know better. And then you get into a shop that does custom manufacturing, for example, and you try to put this MES in place. Well, we’ll talk later about how that could definitely not be a good fit. So even if it was taught in school, even if you think or was taught that that’s best practice, it might not fit your need. So another example would be you’ve hired a customer, sorry, an employee that works in distribution at Amazon and is an expert in inventory management and comes to your facility where you buy to order and you don’t keep inventory, and they start doing all sorts of scheduling or inventory management that they think is best practice, but in your reality, it just doesn’t fit. So let’s just be careful about that portion.

You need predefined task, predefined time, so a very defined recipe. Dependencies between your bill of material level if you go a bit more complex in your product, lining up your material requirement. And I added that little last one here. You’d like to have a system probably that will do finite versus infinite for source scheduling. So if your ERP supports it, you can say that, for example, if it’s my CNC, well, if I put a block in my CNC, I can’t put two, three blocks. It can only do one at a time. That’s finite scheduling. Scheduling. But if you turn around and look at your assembly table, for example, or welders or something like that, if you put more people at that station, they can probably do more. Or if you pull another shift, there you go, you have more capacity. So that’s typically handled into an infinite type scheduling. If your ERP has that capability, like genius, you can definitely say this work center has finite capacity, this other one has infinite capacity. Okay, so that was traditional scheduling. Let’s I’m going to talk about project management scheduling. I gave it out here. Ccpm. We’re really focusing here on this method of critical path project management.

Basically, if I would summarize the And you got to try to put a one-liner here where it’s basically it focuses on your critical path to do your project and to identify the key milestone to make that happen. I’ll do the same thing that we did for the traditional scheduling. I’m sorry, there’s a question here. Oh, no. Okay, it’s a comment. Thank you. All right. So first of all, if we talk about project management, well, typically it’s widely used in the industry, but already we typically are talking about larger contract or projects. Because if we get down to more of a milestone thing, we’re probably not talking of a part that takes half an hour to manufacture. We’re probably talking about a project that takes a couple of weeks that you might even have multiple delivery for. So So we’re talking typically larger contracts. I’ve put on screen an example of how we build budgets in genius to talk about to break down larger contracts. I’m trying to switch page, but it won’t. Give me a second here? There we go. All right. The second thing that we see in project management is milestone. So very early on in your project, you’ll probably identify some of the key milestone.

Hey, I’m going to need permit. We’re going to need to go into design, and we’re going to need some approval from the customer customer, then we have major material in, then there’s shipping on that day. There might be another shipment on the other day. So there’s typically key milestone in your project. It all relies, this technique, on finding your critical path. I’ve got two quicks example here of critical path. Let’s say we go on a lighter project that is basically fabrication in a shop. You can see here in my example, my welding is my, let’s call it the critical path. So what’s happening here is we have a milestone that identify when we need the welding to happen. And whatever comes before the welding is a pull schedule, is a backward schedule, and whatever goes after is push schedule. So what we’re trying to do is find that critical path and optimize it as much as we can. Now, the lower section talks more about a high-level project, a larger project, let’s call it that way. It’s often in large project, you might be in design for weeks. You might start production, and a good portion of your project is not even defined yet.

So that’s typically where we go at scheduling with high-level budgets, key milestone, and that would typically do the trick. So what you What we’re seeing here is we’re basically just saying, Hey, we need to have a certain number of days for designing. Welding should happen around here, and then we have delivery up on that date, and so on. So it relies a lot on defining key milestone to get visibility and control over your entire project. So if I summarize very, very high level here, it’s typically used for larger project contracts, call them however you want. And the key to it is finding your critical path, but mostly identifying which are really your key milestone. Remember I said, let’s keep it simple at the beginning. You can define 100 milestone. True, you probably have 100 milestone that are important for your entire project, but there’s probably a few ones that are really key to driving your entire schedule. Let’s keep in mind that what we’re trying to do here, again, genius has a focus of manufacturing. It’s line up whatever you need to fabricate so it flavors at the proper time. So we’ve talked very high level about what are the scheduling methods out there that we typically see in the market.

Now, what fits your need? To do that, I’ve done a little bit like the fabrication method. I’m trying to find or to divide the type of manufacturers that we have at the table today. So I’ll be dividing everybody to standard manufacturers or custom manufacturers. That might be a hard fit. Don’t worry, I’ll have a both option at the end. A little bit of both. So if I try to describe standard manufacturers, and I try to label it here, that’s typically people that call themselves make to stock or distribution. I’ve also allowed myself to say make to order, though that word will also show up for custom manufacturing. I think we need to boil it down to the bullet points here to understand where I’m trying to go. Standard product is typically something where you’ve done it before, you maybe even have a catalog where people can pick from your specific product, you might even have a price list out there. So that would actually really make you into that standard product offering. Typically, the recipe, the BOM, already exists and has been validated. So like we were saying, you probably know exactly how much time it takes you to do it, at which exact station, work center it goes to with the time predefined.

You’re already seeing where this can match up. We typically have larger size and less variability. Probably a world where you make the shelf, you keep a certain amount on the shelf, you try to forecast your quantities required, and then when you get an order, people are just picking and shipping, or you might be building just in time as well, but it’s already predefined, like we said. We produced a stock based on blanket forecast. Just said it. Minimal changes coming from customer, meaning that there might be some revision, but your product is somewhat standard, except for maybe some light changes through the years into your recipe. Now, custom manufacturers. So again, that make to order comes back again because I want to be careful to… I think it’s wider than just standard or non-standard for make to order. Configure to order, entering to order. Or design to order, design and build is also in there, if you’d ask me. And this is typically where your product was never fabricated in the past. Hey, you might be stocking certain standard component, but the equipment you’re spitting out every time is different. The length of the conveyor, the feater, the speed, the tonnage, whatever it is that defines your product to be different every time, it is a unique product that gets out there.

Typically, we’ll go through estimating process. We’ll have a way of trying to make out what components. We might even go RFQ on things because it’s also an A experiment where often we don’t keep a lot of inventory and we’ll be purchasing a lot on demand. And evaluating labor could be very almost impossible, and it takes knowledge or it takes some very well-defined recipe if your product is somewhat what’s similar one time to the other. There’s typically a lot of variability. We’ll be talking high mix, low volume. That means there’s a lot of components, there’s a lot of milestone or whatever makes your project, and typically it’s one project or a few, and that’s what you have to drive through. Engineering and project managers are typically heavily or highly involved into these type of projects as well. So now I’m going to get my second all out there, and I’d like to know, where do you think you sit? Are you standard manufacturer, custom manufacturer, or probably a bit of both? Hey, I have some standard things that I can give out, and please think of your finish product, what you’re actually selling to your customer, not what you’re building to stock.

Because a lot of you might be very custom, but what you are making your product with might be very standard. But that, for me, means you’re in custom world. All right. I’ve got almost everybody. No, half of the people only answered. Really like to know where you guys are sitting right now. Thank you. All right, I’ll give it another five seconds here. Again, I’m looking for you or your company. Where do you think you’re sitting right now? Okay, I got three quarter of the assistants that voted, so I’m going to end this So right now, and I can share the results, half of you are in a mixed mode. I’m not surprised. About 40 % are custom manufacturers and 12 %, that’s about three of the people that answered, are in standard manufacturing. I do have to say that here at Genius, we are really focused on custom manufacturers. So probably the rest of the conversation will go more on that direction. But still, there’s one or two things I can still tell you that can be very That’s helpful. So let’s continue on here. So for sure, the question was, what fits your needs?

So I think you saw where I was going. Standard manufacturer have a very good fit with the traditional scheduling, the MES tool. The reason is your product are standard. You probably know your recipe. You know what material you require. You know exactly the steps that are required in your shop. It might fluctuate a little bit from time at a time, but typically, ERPs will have a tool to help you through that. That’s pretty much where I want to go there. If you have questions, again, feel free to hit me through the Q&A of the Zoom. For custom manufacturers, and you already notice that I use the green versus red here. Traditional scheduling, not perfect fit. There’s a few things I would probably need from that, but that’s not how we work. And project scheduling, And while I’m thinking there’s a lot of people out there saying, Yeah, that’s what I need, but I need to drive my shop floor. And that’s traditional scheduling. So how does it fit together? And basically, the question comes back is, What’s the solution? I’m missing the puzzle part, or how does it fit together. And well, the entire session so far has been our process thought here at genius.

When we saw these results with the 8 %, five years ago, we figured we need to do something. We already knew, but where do we make the puzzle fit? So if we talk about custom manufacturer’s solution, what we brought to our system, let’s go into the solution that we found out and what we have made available in the system. To do that, I mean, it’s still a webinar. I like to do it a bit interesting. So allow me a two minutes cartoonish approach here. I want to put you in the situation just to see if we’re on the same page. And I’m going to tell you my age a little bit. I don’t know if some of you know Charlie Brown, where the teacher starts talking and just hear blah, blah, blah. I’m thinking the owner comes to this weekly scheduling meeting or management meeting, starts saying, Hey, we had late delivery last week, blah, blah, blah, losing customer, blah, blah, blah, losing money. So typically this goes with my line of thought for this webinar. We start, why do we need scheduling? There you go. Then we have the sales rep comes in and disrupt the entire thing.

Says, hey, Johnson & Johnson, just call me. They like delivering six weeks. Now, perhaps in the mindset, what I had in mind here is maybe a company that takes, I don’t know, 2-3 months to deliver. And now the sales rep comes in with an almost impossible delivery date of six weeks. We can’t do that. And now the first thing you can think is people attention to detail, like engineers or production managers might go and say, okay, how much time is this project? We’re going to have to move stuff just to make place for this new rush job. Then project managers in their head will go, that puts all my project at risk. How am I going to handle this? And each of the project manager have a similar question. How does it change my part? How does it change my priorities? Because typically, they’re still somewhat of a silo, typically, in every industry. And typically, what we hear from the sales rep is, Great, we’re all aligned because I’ve already said yes. And now everybody goes to work, change the scheduling. I don’t know how you work today, but it’s like have people running, changing packets of paper, dates, and people updating Excel or MS Project.

Again, with the tools you have, it could be a nightmare for everybody to update and still be in line with each other. And then 30 minutes later, the owner gets in the room and says, I just talked to Steve. Remember my best friend? I want his order to be the new priority. And then boom, you got to go through it all over So getting the alignment with your team is also key. Staying aligned to what happens on the shop floor, staying aligned with what happens with project management, with all stakeholders, that’s the difficult part. So Challenges. Typically in a custom industry, we don’t necessarily have predefined standard times. So that’s already a wild card. I just wrote unpredictable. That includes so many things. It could be just a story Story I told you about where the sales rep comes in that disrupts everything. One popular one is you have planned for design and approval to take two or three weeks on a twelve-week delivery, but then you figure out customer is just not getting back to you and you get the customer approval two weeks before you should be delivering, and then hell breaks loose.

So many example I could bring to the table. Granular scheduling requires monstrous effort. Sorry for my accent there. Effort. I can think of, hey, if you have a product that goes on for three years, seen this before, with a lot of deliverables, and you’re trying to get down to every 15 minute little task in your shop, well, good luck. I think I’ve said this to someone earlier, your funeral. Well, there’s things we can manage, but if you go too granular, it will require effort. Might it be human effort or computerized effort? Crunching all the numbers, making sure everything’s in line could be monstrous. So Let’s stay careful of staying simple as much as we can. So again, I think you’re trying to see the line up here with the critical path thing. And the last one would be adoption is based on understanding. So many times in the past, we’ve had this experience. I mean, we’re software developers. Put a screen to our customer, find out that it was a bit too hard to use or we didn’t think of designing it exactly how people would use it, and they just dropped it. They never used it until we really made it more how they thought of using it.

So if a tool is too complex, people don’t use it. They drop it. Get the proper tool or easy access tool. And here I’m thinking more about tools for shop floor for project managers This is more wireless. So what do we have in genius? I’m getting there at last. So let’s just throw a few key things out there. So again, we’re probably talking more project level or just the fact that when you get to an estimate, for example, you probably don’t go the hassle of going through the entire routing or task definition. I don’t know how’s your win rate, but if you win 20% of your quote, will you go into defining all the details every time? Maybe not. In genius, we have a tool to define a high-level budget, and that can be used then to help with your scheduling. This is one of the key page I want to show you. If you define your critical path of your project, what are the really important milestone? You can have them interact with your system. First of all, get those key milestone for your critical path in Genius. And you can see here on my graph, I’m showing how traditional scheduling and project scheduling are different layers in our scheduling in Genius that interacts with each other.

So for example, if my critical path, let’s go back to that welding example earlier. If this is my little flag here for welding and I need to have it done sooner, just moving that milestone prior will impact the floor task to be constrained to finish sooner. And every task before them is going to follow along and be rescheduled. So really, again, we’re talking about keeping it simple. Identify which one are these key milestone so your project managers can only move these things to stay in control. Try to stay away from the granular, basically. All right, material planning. Now, seeing like magic earlier because you saw this graph where I have a super precise task, like assembly or cutting, and then I got my raw material below it. Just so you know, we are talking about custom manufacturing. So often, I’m guessing you get into designing, and then first thing you know, you got to get purchase orders out there, but engineering didn’t even touch it yet, or they’re just starting to look at it. I’m guessing you guys have major component in or early purchases or long lead item list that you need to put out there.

What you need to know is before you get into drafting or if you ever do this drafting, you can align material with milestones. So you could have a major material in defined with a date and just line up your list of component to that ingenious. And when or if you ever go to the detail of what we have on screen here, and that can be synchronized with our cap to tool or other methods, then that material can then line up to the proper exact date of your more granular schedule. So it refers back to another webinar we did recently about progressive release or I think we call it concurrent engineering, where production can happen as engineering is designing and releasing stuff. It doesn’t happen in every ERP. That’s another unique feature of ours. And on the right-hand side here, you can now figure out how our material Whatever planning is telling you where you’re in control, where you’re not. If you have long lead items, dates might be in red, whatever falls green you have available, and whatever is red, you need to take action to purchase or to fabricate. Scheduling scenarios or planning scenarios.

I’m not sure why I didn’t use the word scheduling here. So now that you have your plan made up and the sales rep comes in and mess it up, let’s keep my story. I need delivery in six weeks. What can I do? First of all, genius has a capable to promise capacity. So it can say, Hey, your welding is that critical pass, so that’s loaded up until whatever date. So whenever you put your new order in there, it would fall in line and tell you, what do I have available to promise? And then you can come to scenarios like this, and you can do multiple scenarios, by the way. And you can slide that new order to whatever placeholder it wants. In this case, we can see it was bumped up one level. And then Then the system can tell you, you know what? In your simulation, here’s the risk you’re putting on your other orders. Now, are we comfortable? Yes. I can commit? No. Well, let’s discuss. In front of all other project managers, owners, at these weekly meetings, when you have these situations, you can bring them to the table, do scenarios, and when everybody agrees, let’s commit to the scenario that we want.

Just so you know, next week, I’m going to be talking about tools that will have an impact on the floor tools. So if that is linked to the actual welding task and everything, that means somebody like the welder would see on a screen when you commit, that is, Friday list will change live on screen. So like I said, Next one is have the right tools. So to have proper scheduling, it’s not only putting a plan in front of everybody, it’s keeping it up to date. That’s probably one of the major challenge. It’s probably very manual today what you have and trying to line up everybody and knowing what’s done, what’s not done is interactive Excel or whatever that is or emails. Having tools like this one here, what I’m showing is our milestone board right on your phone. So you’re designing, you got an approval, just click Finish or click Complete or Edit and say I’m at 50 %, but give some feedback to the system so you know, genius schedules on remaining time, for example, in our system. I plan 100 hours, we’re a week in. If I reschedule on my job, I’m going to use the remaining time, not the entire 100 hours that I had.

All right, so I’ve tried to keep it to five bullet points here, so it makes sense to everybody. It goes so much further. But in the custom world, typically, these are some of the key features that we bring to the table. Budget, trailing your critical path with key milestones. So you could still be I’m using an MS project somewhere, but I think the key is put the milestone that will help drive your manufacturing floor in genius. Material planning, using the planning scenarios to make it even smoother because, I mean, let’s face it, custom manufacturers was ever changing. There’s so many impacts of things being delayed or brought back. And having easy tool to make sure that your crew on the shop floor, your project managers can align everything together. That’s not even talking about our dashboarding, where put those key milestone in front of you. Put the project where the budget’s at risk or we’ve reached a milestone, but it’s not completed yet. Have these key indicators in front of you. And I think if there’s one thing I can leave you with today, if you get into a project like this, whatever you have in front of you today is what you can have.

What do you want to have? You should have a mockup. I don’t mind if it’s on a napkin or something, but what are the key indicators that you think would have your company strive. And when you come to whatever ERP software, whatever scheduling tool you’ll want to use, put that in front of the implementers, me or whoever, and they’ll tell you, I can’t do this, I can’t do that. We’ll find something for this. You’re giving them a mission. You’re ensuring that they have the proper deliverables for you to put in place so you can have your indicators and strive. So giving you homework here. I don’t know if that’s what you had in mind, but that’s really the best way of putting it in front of a consultant. Here’s what I need. Can you deliver this? So that’s really your end result. Yes, you want your managers are ready to use it for it to be easy, but that’s the end result is executive dashboard, making sure you’re seeing control, project manager’s dashboard and stuff like that. In conclusion, what we’ve done today, we’ve talked about why scheduling is key for manufacturers. I’ve spoken about the traditional method, MES, and the project scheduling method.

I’d like you to ask yourself more deeply, which method is good for my need? That might be a little bit up to the consultant that will help you, but definitely, I think you guys can already figure out, Okay, I need to go here. This doesn’t fit our industry. I’ll remind again that you might be tented by people that are coming from school or people that are coming from other industries that doesn’t manufacture the same way you do. Just be careful about that. A system that connects shop floor and your project managers, everybody to the system so you can keep that real-time data up to date. And a system, if you can, like genius, that combines or has dependencies between that traditional method into that project management method layer. Keep it simple. The more granular you go, the more monstrous the effort is going to be to keep that up to date. All right, I’ll I’ll invite you again to find the Q&A of Zoom and ask me your question because I’m already almost at the end here. For our existing customer, a little comment here. I don’t know if you knew, but through genius Academy, you can hit us three times a week.

You can see an example here of a few customers logging on with us, asking us questions. Hey, I didn’t do credit in six months. How do I do it again? Can I share my screen? Can you help me, Frank? And we’ll do a step by step together. That’s really what it’s used for. It serves so much us and our customer to in line since we have these ongoing again, Monday, Wednesday, and Fridays. You just hit us. And that’s how you can get to us through the Academy platform. You can click on Ask the Expert, and you just subscribe to the next one. In that same platform over the last year and a half or so, what we try to put in front of our customers is how to choose the right scheduling method for you. So I went so high level today. This is going so much more in-depth. So if you hit these keywords, choose the right scheduling mode, you will find this course here on Academy, where it does a concept review that is similar to what I did, but more in-depth. And in that first exercise, if you go into the downloadables, you’ll have for MTO, CTO, ETO type businesses, and I think there’s five choices in there of different visio chart to help you identify what you need to use in genius to really up your game.

So that really takes you a certain part of the way. And that second keyword is a smart scheduling class. So if you want to know more about that smart scheduling, that critical path type project scheduling, we have an entire recorded class that our product owner that developed that portion of the software taught to some of our customers. We recorded a class. It’s available, again, free of charge. Everything I just sold you is on academy, you can reach it. All right, call to action. So again, existing customers, if you want to know more, if you need to know how to access your academy or something, here’s the email of customer success. Here are the keywords that you would be on the look out for on our learning platform. And by the way, for anybody, what inspired us on top of that poll or survey about the 8 % using the scheduling in their ERP, were these book about manufacturing processes. Sees. Famous book by Eliu Goldratt, The Goal and Critical Chains. So pretty much all the concepts that I’ve talked about today are described in there with a lot of situation and example, great books to take a chew out of if you want.

If you’re new to genius and you want to know more about us, here’s the email, say hello@geniuserp. Com, and you can reach recording of this webinar as soon as it’s available in about one day or two, straight on our website on the Resource tab. If you want to reach me personally, well, the first thing would be hit me in a Q&A right now. I’ll have your email, I’ll write back to you if I don’t answer you today. And there’s my personal email at the bottom there. All right. I’ve already saw that I lost one or two participants. I want to thank everybody for being here today. Again, we do monthly webinars, and the next month we’ll have a webinar about budgeting for your ERP implementation, how to choose your proper ERP. It’s going to be around that topic. All right, I’ll take your questions. Oh, thank you, Kurt. All right. Yes, good question. So Kurt is asking, Can G-US be installed on-prem or is it available in the cloud? Only available. No, you actually have the option. G-us Nuneas works with an SQL database, so that still needs to be installed somewhere. So it’s either on your server, might you host your server or have them on site so we can deploy to any place you want.

We also offer a hosting solution Same with Azure. So that’s definitely in the options that you have when you come with us. If you want to know more, again, use that SayHello address. Ask that question if you want to know more information. We’ll put you in contact with the right person. No other question for real? I did this French session this morning, the same thing. I had like 15 questions. Come on, I’m sure you guys have a million questions for me. All right. Somebody’s asking what technology is available for dashboarding and for reporting to get that visibility. Okay, so probably this is a customer asking, in the In the recent version, we have our analytics that allows you to do super nice dashboarding. And the fun part about them is they’re already linked to the database. You can just drag and drop fields. As I said, we’re sequel-based. I still see a lot of customers doing… You can do your reporting through genes, but there’s a Power BI, there’s Tableau, there’s so many things that can connect to SQL and allow you to do your own reporting. So at that point, I mean, putting, I don’t know, a list of your job, key miles Stone, percentage progress based on hours or budgets or what’s at risk.

I’m seeing this type of dashboard. We actually have something that resembles exactly that that you can download from our help file if you want to use that. It’s a project management dashboard dashboard. Okay. Yes, there’s another question about the recording. You have the recording again. Well, you’ll probably get a thank you email with the link to the recording, but it will be available on our website as well through the resource section. I don’t have any more questions. What I’ll do, I’ll mute myself, but I’ll leave it open for two minutes. If anybody is still typing a question, that will give you time to click Enter and send it to me. Thank you, everybody. Hope to see you next month or the month after in our next webinar. Enjoy your day. Yeah. Kurt, good question. You can go… Well, I think you mean Express, I’m guessing, So your question is which type of SQL is required? I think if you go cloud, the hosting includes that SQL, and I think it’s a full version of some kind. If you go on site, I think you can use Express. The reason I say I think there might be some functionality, we have sometime analytics, for example, that might use the analytics from SQL.

So you might have certain limitations, but I think we still have customers that are leveraging Express for their database, so it’s still feasible. All right. Grab my email from the page here if you need to have a more question, answer or the SayHello email again, we’ll be happy to answer, Kurt, if you still have more questions. We’re going to have to close this now. Thank you, everybody.