infoBoard in the middle of Irland
An island in the middle of the Atlantic ocean- a place that US companies like a lot, that has a great potential for English-speaking employees. I have never seen this place with such a perspective. It’s a good thing to visit places yourself so that you can change perspective. The economy is based mainly on exportation since the population is relatively small with just 4,8 million people but where there is a lot of “manufacturing” there has to be also infoBoard.
The task setting of both company owners was four weeks in advance: this in order to be able to have an overview on the orders in production, to provide a well-grounded statement based on the processing status of five units regarding new orders’ delivery dates and on the sales department of the successful company.
Our software partner in Irland held meetings and organized a training course and with his help the current 620 planning objects could be selected and assembled. Each planning object could include up to 20 individual components. Each scanned operation step was added to his software, so that the orders that had already been started to be processed would have been well visible through scanned processing steps and the cumulative hours also, through progress bars.
The scheduled orders that are not on time land up on infoBoard Sync Tool Server (in the pool-rows*). The production platform lights up brightly when infoBoard shows delivery overruns. I wished I had brought with me the Enterprise Edition so that I could have seen a balanced planning of the Critical Chain Projectmanagement (CCPM).
InfoBoard was reordered. I was happy, the users are happy, the software partner understood the possibilities for his other clients. The database interface is really powerful. You have the feeling as if we were part of a string quartett of a big orchestra. I have to explain this: 30 years ago, during a special night at the Hamburger Markthalle dedicated to Hamburg’s rock’n’roll bands I was the band leader of a band called “Billy de Lion and the Wild Cats”, famous in Hamburg and we played in front of 1000 spectactors. To get ready we have at our disposal 4 wind instruments and we tried a version of the song “Stagger Lee” with a horn section. This was incredibly powerful because the sound almost threw off the stage…….and the leaves came tumblin’ down…. (the drumbeats).
Now the presentation of the board of directors. He asks what has happened: I just received an order that has to be delivered on Friday (customer-oriented flexibility seems to be a factor for success). We open a preprepared sample order, they dictate to us the time exposure in 5 parts and we plan the order. The result: the order was prepared a weeek too late of the delivery date.
I have always engaged myself so that infoBoard would be used as an operational planning tool with a unique resource allocation. Here was only an ERP system with very detailed working steps that made it impossile to have a corrrect visualization. But since the software partner masterly treated the data and (can) listens, the presentation of the executive board could be implemented fast and well.
Now has to be enforced also the planned order on infoBoard. InfoBoard web application is useful for the Shopfloor, which makes a list of all of the tasks of the day that have to be processed for each sector .
The remaining task for the company employees is to take care of the working hours and the accurate work hour confirmation of the Design. Essential requirements for the quality of infoBoard’s outlook.
*) Small anecdote: While I am in the workshop it comes natural for me to say the word “pool”. With this term I (and all Germans) mean the group of unallocated tasks. We either take the pool or take from the pool. The confused expressions on my irish co-workers’ faces made me think that the word for them probably had a different meaning. Actually at the end can the production managers that agreed with me on the meaning of the expression explained. I only know that this expression has become parto fo the German language in Germany. This is another case of internationalisation: the reimportation of english words with changed meaning. Very interesting.