Specialty manufacturers

How work moves in specialty manufacturing

It starts with a request for quote, often a drawing and a quantity. Estimating works out material, routing and labor, sometimes with an engineer's help, and asks vendors for pricing on anything bought or sent out. Sales sends the quote and follows up. When the order comes in, it may not match the quote: a different quantity, a revised drawing, a tighter date.

Engineering reviews the order, releases or revises the drawing, and sometimes sends it back to the customer for approval. Purchasing orders material and schedules outside processing. Production planning builds the job: a traveler with the routing, the operations at each work center, the revision and the inspection points. The job moves across the floor, out to a vendor and back, through final inspection and into shipping, where the packing list and any certificates the customer asked for go in the box. Accounting invoices it and, later, someone compares what the job cost to what it was quoted.

Where it usually breaks

The traveler carries less than the order

Sales agreed to a special finish. The customer approved a revised drawing by email. Engineering noted a tolerance change in the job folder. The traveler shows the part number and the old revision. That is the handoff gap, and it shows up as scrap, rework and parts made correctly to the wrong drawing. The guide on promises that never reach the crew applies to the floor as much as to field crews.

Drawing approvals wait on nobody in particular

A job cannot release until the customer signs off on a drawing or an engineer approves a deviation. Nothing reminds anyone, and the job sits in a folder until the due date is close. That is approval drag. The guide on nobody knowing who approved what covers how to record the decision and the person.

Jobs vanish into outside processing

Parts go out for plating or heat treat. The ERP shows the operation as open. The actual status, the due-back date and the certificate that must come with them live in a spreadsheet on the purchasing lead's desktop. That is the invisible queue. The guide on spreadsheets that became the system of record walks through how to find these.

Nobody knows what the job really cost

Labor is clocked against the wrong job, or not clocked at all. Scrap and rework are not recorded. The quote-to-actual comparison is done by hand months later, if at all, so the next quote repeats the same guess. That is the re-entry trap at the end of the line. See the guide on estimates that don't match actual job costs.

The first workflow we usually look at

Order release: from the signed order to the first operation on the floor. We follow a handful of recent jobs backward from the floor to the quote and note every place a detail was agreed, changed or approved, and whether it reached the traveler. We sit with the planner while they build a job and with the lead at the first work center while they read one. The questions the lead has to walk to the office to ask are the fields the release is missing.

When release gathers the order, the current revision, the approvals and the agreed exceptions in one place, the traveler carries them, and inspection and shipping inherit them.

The systems in the picture

A specialty manufacturer usually runs some mix of these:

• An ERP or MRP system for orders, routings, purchasing and inventory
• CAD and a drawing or document vault, with its own revision history
• An accounting system, sometimes inside the ERP
• Printed travelers and work center whiteboards
• Shop floor time clocks or terminals, where they exist
• Spreadsheets for outside processing, quoting and the schedule
• Email for customer drawings, approvals and change requests

What a Workflow Spec looks like here

A Workflow Spec for a specialty manufacturer is $15,000, fixed, and done on site. We spend time at estimating, engineering, the planner's desk and the first work centers, and we walk a few jobs from quote to ship. We interview the people who touch an order, measure how long real jobs wait at release today and count how often the floor has to ask a question the order already answered. You get the workflow map, the business case, an adoption design built for the floor leads and planners who would use the tool, and a fixed proposal for the build. The answer can be not to build. Details are on how we work.