shop floor software

[Thee Dragracer1951]

We're growing and are making the move to real live shop floor software. E2 from Shoptech

My question is about cost centers and CNCmills vs CNC lathes, Manual mills vs manual lathes...

What do you guys charge for different machines?

[Kyle Waters]

Jim,

We are currently in the process of getting rid of E2 but when we started with it we simply went with the same hourly rates we had been quoting prior. We have seperate codes for production work so that we don't get the pricing screwed up.

HTH

[Thee Dragracer1951]

Thanks Kyle

May I ask why you are getting rid of E2? (Seeings as how I just bought it...)

[ToolMan184]

Jim,

 

I use E2 as well. They are coming out with version 8 first of year. It does everything I need it to do.

[Guest]

You know if you guys were a little closer to the southern border someone might misunderstand you and though you said

 

y tu

 

[crazy^millman]

Well I think you need to decide which machines make you the most money. Then you need to decide which machines have the highest cost when it comes to personal, tools, electric, programming, and other factors related to the daily operation of the machines. Then a typical backlog of your machines needs to be taken into account as this will also decide what to set the rate at for each machine. Typically in most shops I have been in have a lower shop rate for their turning center than the milling centers. I have seen shop rates from $30 to $250 and hour for machines in a shop. The $30/hr rate was for conventional equipment and the $250/hr was on a 5-axis 6 spindle gantary mill. The biggest thing you will find is just the ability to track cost will be your biggest benfit to having the system. This and this alone will problay be your biggest thing to setting the hourly rate for each piece of equipment in the shop.

 

The biggest thing is don't sell your equipment and your personal short. If you have a machine that is at 120% capacity get top dollar for the work going to that machine and be slective the work you do book for it and vice versa don't low bid work to get stuff in the door. This can be a killer for the shop a well as a business. To have work is great but if you have to put $100 bills on each part you ship out the door makes no sense either. It is balance and sometimes you have to shoot from the hip, but track it, document it, and log it.

 

Hope that has planted some ideas and starts the ball rooling in the direction of progress and growth.

[Kyle Waters]

Jim,

When we first bought E2(Y dos) we did all short run stuff, 10 was a big order. Since then our parent company has started shifting more and more of the production side of work over to us. In our experience, it hasn't worked out well. E2 is very well versed in the money side of things, but we are not having much luck with the tracking of parts throughout the processes. We are now to the point of counting parts about once a month just to keep all things in order. Also, we would like to start automating all the paperwork for our sub contract processes as well as have E2 automatically generate a P.O. for a part when the order is generated...the answers we get are "no problem" however, accomplishing this has been something else. I am not blaming Shoptech in any way, we may very well have started out all wrong entirely, but that isn't getting us anywhere so we are looking to get into an online type system.

[ToolMan184]

Jim,

 

I have differnt shop rates for different machine types (manual Mill, manual lathe, cnc mill, cnc lathe, wire edm etc.). I then have different rates for type of work (general machine, die, gages etc.) this can all be set up into E2. When quoting you set your billing rate and all the machines will quote from that rate that you set up for each machine. We also do min-max levels for parts we need to stock.

[bhayden10]

We run our shop on E2 now. We have 4 mills and 6 lathes. As with any new software there is a pretty big learning curve. At first the owner and I thought we could do it all along with the quoting and programming but to get full use of E2 it just took to much time. We finally hired a secretary and had her learn the software and it has helped the flow of the shop alot.

[Thee Dragracer1951]

Well, won't my wife be thilled with that...Snerk!

Actually we have a person that will be running the software. I just need to get a handle on what the rates are for different cost centers. I want to track jobs through the shop as right now we have about 160 jobs in house and maybe 30 or so out of house.

I'd also like to be able to cost jobs.

[Tim Simmermon]

As far as the job tracking goes, get the barcode scanner. Without having your employees time in and out with a barcode scanner, you'll spend all night entering time tickets to keep up.

 

As far as the rates go, just use the rates you're using now. The only thing I found we needed to do was break them up (overhead and labor to get true cost analysis.

 

Costing jobs is easy in E2, enter the job number and presto. Again, the barcode scanner to have employees time in and time out would be beneficial here. If they don't, all you'll see is the outside services and material.