ERP / MRP

Video Text

00:02          Okay, welcome everyone. We'll just get into this, the Erp connections and how to locking your big or important customers. So what we're going to run through today, this won't be a real long because it's a webinar because it's actually a pretty simple idea and you'll see that I was some diagrams a little bit later, but the topics today we're going to talk about just briefly, what is an Erp system, what's sort of the normal business flow of parts that come into your, uh, into your company? I'm a business challenge and actually a very important business challenge. I'm changing the game and uh, some conclusions. Um, we'll take some questions after that. 

00:47          So what is an ERP system? Well, an ERP system stands for enterprise resource planning and that makes it a whole lot clearer. It doesn't and I'm an older systems sometimes referred to as MRP systems and uh, that stands for materials, requirements planning. So in an ERP system is typically the one I put that in quotes, um, system, not necessarily only only software system in, uh, manufacturers, um, you know, for their company, but it's basically the main system for the company. Um, and it includes obviously manufacturing. They'll have things like hr, General Ledger, full accounting, payroll, all sorts of stuff along with it. Um, so typically manufacturers use erp systems now, so both of these Erp and the older version MRP, they're very manufacturing centric. That's what they're built for. But they're not at all friendly for service based companies. I'm like, you, you're in the manufacturing supply chain, you're probably not producing parts, you're not building anything. 

02:00          You're taking parts in from a customer doing something to them and returning them and Erp systems were not built for that type of a dynamic environment. So that's where blue streaks steps set. So let's just take a look at a normal business workflow. So for your existing customers, you probably have some kind of a workflow of the part, something like this. So at some point some parts show up and you're receiving dock, you may be expecting them or you might not be expecting them. They just sort of appear. Um, there's gonna be some paperwork that come along with those parts. A generally a purchase order or purchase order, maybe part diagrams or some other information usually revolves around the Po. That's, that's the sort of the key document with information about what they need to have you do to these parts. At that point you, you have one or more people that get involved to enter these parts in the blue streak basically to produce a work order, uh, after that is the work orders put in and you've got all the media attached that you want pictures and things like that to po document in other documents that came in. 

03:15          Someone will do some type of a contract review or take a look at the work order, make sure everything is correct. I'm a, as you can make it based on the information you have at that point, uh, the parts are generally released to production. However you do that, you know, obviously the parts have to physically get moved somewhere, uh, but you, if you're tracking inside of Blue Street, you're going to track out of this contract review operation and they will flow into the first operation out on the shop floor. Then some time passes and the customer calls in and they want to know what status on the parts, where are these parts, and maybe they're doing this daily, maybe it's a hot order and they're doing it multiple times during the day. We've got a tool for that called production pathway. I'm happy to talk you talk to you about that or I excuse me, customer connector, and we can talk to you about that if you'd like. 

04:12          Um, and then eventually you complete the parts, inform the customer somehow. And I'm either they, uh, pick them up or you deliver them. So that's a typical workflow of parts. Now, here's a significant business challenge and um, everybody has this. So what can you do? It would be really nice to be able to lock in these important customers, uh, so that they only use your shop and now the competitor's shop and these could be, these are probably going to be customers, they could be large customers quite often the are and you're getting some good volume or you get just a lot of just regular parts from them and you just want to lock them in so that they don't wonder about looking at a competitor. So how do you do that? As in, as you know, you've got flooded and competitors out there and they're all vying for the same business and they're using something like a price or some other type of incentive to try to lure them away from a you. So how do you deal with that? Well, one thing's for sure. Um, if you interact exactly the same as a competitor, uh, with your customer, there's really no compelling reason for them to stay with your company. So if there's no difference in the interaction, then I'm a competitor is really easy to switch to just even try them. It may seem like a harsh statement, but it, unless there's some really close ties, it really lock you in, lock your customer and with you they will at some point entertain other options with your competitors. 

06:00          So the question is then, how can you make your relationship with, uh, an important customer? Are many important customers, competitor proof? Well, basically you have to change the game and one way you changed the game with your important customers is to connect directly with their internal Erp or Mrp or crm or other tlas three letter acronyms, internal systems basically. So the idea is to connect seamlessly with their internal system or systems, um, which, uh, your competitor will not be able to do. 

06:41          So how does this tight coupling or this integration with your customer's system work? Basically when your customer's Erp system determines they will have a job router off. I'll show you some pictures of this a little bit. When their ERP system determines the routing of the parts, the next routing is for your company service. So that could be heat treating their coding or plating they're testing or whatever. Basically, whatever you provide, the service you provide to the prior parts, their system, their ERP system will call your blue streak system. And then at that point, blue streak will respond, uh, and it can do it in nearly any fashion that you want, but typically a work order is going to be generated for your company automatically with all the customer part information and the appropriate process. And nobody has to touch anything for this to happen. And we can easily identify these work orders that are generated through this fashion and it wasn't added by a person. 

07:48          And then, um, some type of an automatic contract review. These, you know, any number of tests can be performed on this, a new work order inside a blue streak and then the work or could even be routed to the correct internal work center for instance. And uh, or could even let a truck driver, that's our particular route, know that these parts are available and ready to be picked up by the customer. And then after you finished processing the parts, uh, and you get them shipped out, the blue streak can call back to your customers' Erp and let them know that this particular job, these parts are done. 

08:30          So what are the advantages of this type of type, a tight coupling between blue streak and these important customers and their internal systems? Well, the first thing is you can dramatically reduce labor requirements for your customer. And for you. Now we've seen this because we've done this with, uh, with customers and our customers' customers. And what happens is, you know, quite often for your customer when they're going to send parts to you, it's probably a very labor intensive activity. People are, have to go and make copies of paperwork, maybe specifications, and of course a Po is going to get printed out and they might have diagrams, tool drawings and things to assemble. So they assemble all of this stuff, all this paperwork, and then it's got to go down to their shipping department and it's all got to get set up there. Um, so there's a lot of labor on your customer side to get these parts ready, lithium information that's required to be sent to you. 

09:39          And um, another advantages, human transcription errors go to nearly zero. Um, and that's because I'm somebody on your, uh, at your customer doesn't have to type anything, um, maybe fill out a word document or something, uh, against assembling paperwork. They could easily pull the wrong part drawing or attached the wrong po. So there's that kind of stuff going on on your end when people are typing that information in to blue streak, they could easily transcribe some numbers and it could make a huge difference. So that kind of stuff goes in nearly zero. And then what happens with this type of integration is that if you're doing some tests to make sure that the data is coming in as complete and make sense for this customer, if the, if the blue streak auto contract review for instance, see something that's not quite right, it can tell you that and then you can notify your customer immediately. 

10:39          So, and we've seen this happen often, so there is the data that was actually set up for this job at the customer was actually wrong and you know, you found it or your blue streaks system found it and let them know that this is incorrect. So those problems usually end up you finding problems that they have a data wise and you can learn to alert them to that. Third thing here is much faster turnaround. So you can see already if you have this type of integration that's just system, the system communications. No people are involved that all of this data flows and happens much faster than having to, having to have people involved the assembling paperwork and entering this kind of, uh, uh, information into blue streak and in your customer's Erp system. And a fourth thing here, competitors, they won't be able to duplicate this level of conductivity and service. 

11:42          So that's kind of obvious. Um, blue street gives you the ability to do that and um, it is very likely that their systems don't even have an option or to do something like that. So big, big advantage. They're changing the game. So what is this type of tight coupling looked like? Let's just take a look at a little diagram here and I'm going to zoom up here a bit on this. So here's a little diagram of basically what happens when I was talking about you can take a look down here and uh, for the different steps, see what's going on, but basically it all starts with your customer's Erp or Mrp or internal system, whatever that is. Their system is going to generate some sort of a traveler and internal traveler. And then, uh, at a particular point in time in their routing of that traveler, if your parts are going to require service by your company. 

12:43          And at that point their system just automatically calls to your blue streak system. So through the, through the Internet cloud, this message comes your blue streak. And then that kicks off a process of taking that information, building a work order, doing some automatic checks, whatever tests you want to do on that data. And then eventually a work order on your side is generated. Now, this could be, as I mentioned earlier, the first step in this work order could be a on operation step for a, a driver to go out and pick the, pick up the parts and then give you notified immediately when this happens. Uh, parts of brought in, um, obviously this work order's already done. Nobody needs to do anything other than start tracking it if you're tracking using blue streak production pathway or if you're not, you just basically send the parts. 

13:38          I'm out on the floor to the first, uh, first operation, wherever that takes place. And then eventually, whether you're tracking, you're not tracking, you're going to complete this order and when that event occurs, then this is an optional step, but blue street can go back through the Internet to your customers' Erp and let it know that it's completed. You know, that, that job, their internal job, that routing step is now completed from you. We could send along other information to certifications and things like that. Um, so that's all sort of dependent upon what type of coupling you want with this customer. So there's a couple asterisks here. Uh, you seen a step to when their system calls your blue streak system and then when you're blue streak system calls back to the ERP system. These are really the, these are the custom integration points and this will be different for each customer that you want. 

14:38          So you're not going to do this with all your customers by any stretch. You're going to take your big customers the real important ones, um, and, and put this type of integration together and each one of them will have a different back end erp system. They'll have different data coming in, they'll have different tests perhaps that you want to do. I'm on the blue streak side. Um, so all of that is going to be very different. There's going to be commonalities, but there's gonna be differences between each customer and then the work order that's generated here internally in your system. That's where this custom, we call it auto contract review. Logic can be set up and it can be completely different for every customer that you've got an integration with. Um, so as I mentioned, you get to have a pickup parts operation or something like that that gets sent out to the appropriate truck to get the parts so you can just step through here and see what goes on. 

15:35          But basically it's exactly what I, uh, I just stepped you through. So this is how simple it is from an, from a system standpoint, very simple to do this and what we would do is work with your customer and their it department or if they have a consultant for the ERP system, work with them on these connection points and they can be a, if it's a newer system, then we can have a more sophisticated connection. Um, and we generally use what's called a web service. I'm not going to get in the technical part of it, but that's what gets called here. And then calling back their system would have to have the ability to, um, receive some information back about that job. Um, we've often, we've also worked with really, I'm kind of old and MRP systems, which you'll probably find a lot of those out there for a customer. 

16:34          And this particular one I'm recalling, they didn't have, it was pretty old, the only type of connectivity we could get with it, the only thing they could do, so they'd have this event saying, okay, the parts needed to be sent to this customer is they could produce an FTP, which is just a, uh, some information. It's basically like a text, a text document that's sent over the Internet through this really kind of old protocol fell the file transfer protocol and that's the only thing that this thing could do. So we're like, fine, okay, we can deal with that. So we just looked for this particular FTP document that come in however often, multiple times during the day it's happening and we just pick it up, parse out all the data and do what we need to do with it. In that case, they couldn't get any answer for that one because we were so, such an old system, we couldn't talk back to this MRP systems say the job was done. So this, this optional part down here at the bottom didn't happen for that particular instance. Um, so this is all configurable. Um, it really doesn't matter what the system is, um, we can get some type of connection to it, 

17:51          so some conclusions here. So once you have this type of connectivity with these, either high volume are very important customers, they're not going to even entertain looking at a competitor for a couple reasons and you can probably come up with many more on your own, but some of the things that you've done for them is that you have allowed your customer to eliminate this labor of assembling paperwork needed when they ship the parts to, to you, to an outside vendor and your competitors, well, they're going to require them to reverse this improvement of and they're going to have to actually add labor costs in order to work with a competitor. So you can see how that's a big barrier once you're hooked in with them in, unless you just like really mangled or parts consistently, they are not going to try to work with a competitor. It's just, it's so much easier and you've saved them so much time. It would be foolish for them to do that. Another item here, their internal data is now going to be effectively double checked by your blue streak, a system so that results in more accuracy of their data and ultimately quality and this is something that your competitors, they would look at someone they're not going to be able to easily help to improve that kind of data or the quality of their parts, your customers' parts. 

19:20          A third thing here, you've. What you've done is improved your customer's delivery performance by saving a lot of time with a faster turnaround and that's because you don't have all this labor and human element involved and your competitors are going to end up slowing down their turnaround and all this time savings that you've given them. Giving your customer was going to be lost and huge impediment. Now I know a lot of you are probably on the on sort of the end of the manufacturing supply chain and what what I hear all the time is that your customer is trying to make up all the delays that they've had going to other vendors and internally all the time delays. They try to make it up in. In your, in your service with us heat treating or coding or plating, so all this time that they've lost, they want you to be like super efficient so it gets done. 

20:25          So they'll send you parts and they wanted a week ago because they're so far behind in their turnaround. So if you can save them a lot of time, um, by not having people involved and having the errors that are associated with that, that's, that's huge. Uh, so it's a huge selling point to your customers. All these things. And then the last one here, and certainly not the last but last I'm listening here, is that you obviously you're going to create this tight bond with your customer. And what happens when you have this tight bond and you help them be more efficient and the turnaround times faster and the accuracy and the quality is better because of all this. You're going to get more work sent to you. That's typically what happens. So it's definitely a huge benefit for you. It's a benefit for the customer. The more they can send to you, the more time they save. And of course your competitors, they won't be able to get any kind of a foothold with, uh, with your now partner customer because they won't be able to offer this kind of stuff and your customer is not going to want to go backwards. Oh yeah. We want to go over here so we can spend a whole lot more labor and our slow down or turnaround time so we can save fifteen cents on this part or two cents a pound on this heat treating. It's not gonna happen. 

21:49          So that's basically it for this Webinar, your API connections. Um, if anyone has any questions, raise your hand. I don't see any hands being raised here. Um, but, uh, if you're watching this after, uh, the, uh, the live parts or you're watching this recorded Webinar, then you have any questions, just send in a help request that's at the top link at every page in blue streak and we will definitely respond to that immediately. So, Jean, I'm going to send this back to you. Okay? Thank you. Let's just fix our screens here. 

22:30          Okay. All right. So continuing on letting you know that our next webinar topic will be the new features and functionality within blue streak, and that's November 14th, also a Tuesday, uh, reporting one-on-one within blue street. Today is the deadline for this class. We do have a minimum of registration. So if you are interested in this very deep dive, high level course, a class given by Todd Wenzel, please contact contact us today. So that concludes our presentation. Thank you. We will see you next month at our webinar. Goodbye.