Shop management software clears the paper trail for Texas metal fabricator

Modern Machine Shop, June, 1994

Goza Products Inc., located in Garland, Texas is a precision machine parts and sheet metal fabricator serving the aerospace and defense industries for 28 years. By utilizing the EstiTrack shop management system, Goza Products has eliminated or greatly reduced much of excess paper that shops can accumulate running their businesses.

In 1992, Goza decided to reevaluate their methods of job costing and tracking actual manufacturing costs. Goza Product's first area of concern was its in-house paper trail. The manual documentation and certification process that had served its purpose for years had grown hopelessly antiquated. Purchase orders, shop travelers, invoice and shipping documents were primarily generated manually. This system was not only labor intensive but very difficult to modify or update to meet the changing requirements of industry.

The task of reviewing potential software was given to Lee Horton and Joe Poole. "We were dealing with a shop full of computer illiterate individuals," said Mr. Horton, Systems Consultant. "It was vital that we implement the new software as painlessly as possible. We wanted team members to be comfortable with the new system, not intimidated by it." "We looked at dozens of shop management software systems," added Joe Poole, Director of Sales/Marketing. "After viewing the EstiTrack System from Henning Industrial Software we ended up comparing everything we could find to the EstiTrack system. After several weeks of exhaustive research we chose EstiTrack over several major software competitors, some costing ten times as much."

Henning Industrial Software, of Hudson, Ohio specializes in providing practical and affordable personal computer (PC) software solutions for the manufacturing industry. Goza Products installed the EstiTrack Shop Management system in June 1993. After a learning curve of hours instead of days, the EstiTrack system was described as having an immediate impact on the availability of useable information. Six PC-based workstations had been networked together to a single 486 server using local area network (LAN) software. Cost estimating, job planning, scheduling, purchasing, shipping and receiving and billing were sharing information as they had not been able to before.

A few weeks after the initial learning and burning period, Goza Products purchased the EstiTrack bar coding and remote time collection software, ET Remote. ET Remote enabled Goza Products to collect employee time and shop floor activity through networked PC workstations using bar coded employee IDs and routing reports. Operators wand-in their IDs to clock in and clock out thereby essentially eliminating the need for time clocks, time cards and the manually intensive job of calculating employee hours. Shop floor personnel also wand in the jobs they are working on from the routing report.

Each time an operator wands in, they are prompted for how they are about to spend their time (for example: setup, downtime, production run, and so on). The system then tracks and calculates the elapse times between these different time events. This "real-time" snapshot of what is happening on the shop floor is then monitored from the office. Management simply has to select the In-Process monitoring screen to see exactly what is currently happening on the shop floor.

With the addition of six more PC workstations, two in the programming lab and four on the shop floor, they were utilizing up-to-the-minute manufacturing information. "The guys really got with the program," said Keith Dennison, shop manager. "We expected more problems than we encountered. Within a couple of days we were relatively mistake free with our manufacturing data."

"The impact on our business has been immeasurable," stated Mr. Goza. "Not only are our quotes more productive, now we have a clearer picture of our profitability and can spot potential manufacturing problems before they tie up production. "Our technical support has been fantastic," added Mr. Horton. "The folks at Henning Industrial Software never tired of our calls and suggestions. Henning Industrial Software and the EstiTrack system in particular have allowed Goza products to compete on an equal level with the best of our competition."