Recently, we were allowed to watch how incoming customer inquiries are processed in a metal processing company. From our observations, we wanted to develop recommendations for the team management to speed up the processes, because the response times were simply too long. By the time the quotes were submitted, it was usually too late and the requests were piling up...
What we have observed certainly occurs in this or a very similar form in many metal processing companies because the processes are very similar. Either a customer inquiry is received by e-mail or the inquiry data is downloaded from a customer portal. 3D data such as STEP are usually also included. Then you also have a good idea of what is involved. Often, entire components, modules, and assemblies are requested. These then have to be painstakingly "disassembled" into their individual parts in order to then carry out a calculation and, if necessary, an expert inspection for each individual part.
As soon as the experts have done this legwork, the real work begins: Searching, asking, and exchanging information about where the requested data for another project is located that is supposedly very similar to this one. After all, you know that similar requests have been processed before. As a smart and efficient employee, you don't want to do the work again if it's already been done before. Or at least you want to make sure.
It was precisely this safeguard that was very important, especially for the young employees in the department, because they didn't have more than 20 years of experience and still wanted to deliver very good work. If you don't have the necessary know-how, it can easily happen that you are 20% to 30% off - and that is fatal. To avoid this, more experienced employees have to check the process repeatedly. This takes time and ties up unnecessary resources. And yet it still happens that prices are not calculated accurately enough because there is simply not enough time and the inquiries pile up. And how do the departments help themselves?
Out of this situation, many departments have tried to find a remedy: In many Excel spreadsheets, customers and inquiry numbers are stored with dates, prices, process information and inquiry data so that they can be found again "quickly". So far so good. But this Excel spreadsheet must be meticulously maintained and updated on a daily basis. In conjunction with an ERP system and other tables, you are constantly jumping from one source to another. The content of all these sources also has to be searched and checked individually. Once you start searching for transactions in these tables, there is also a lack of visualization options. Thus, most users limit themselves and concentrate on a handful of "meetings" and then draw on the comparative data one by one. Again, this takes time because the drawings, routings, and calculations are stored in different places. This is all well and good, but it is simply annoying, tedious, and ties up unnecessary time. As a result, the efficiency of the work goes into the basement, because one is held up with many small, but nevertheless necessary, work steps. And one is not sure whether one has limited oneself to the right hits at all. But there is no other possibility because time is running out.
Many companies already have very profound knowledge of how to optimally design their processes and how to calculate their prices in a proven way. And so we come back to our observations. It is not a question of questioning the processes with a raised forefinger. It's about making proven processes even better, streamlining them, eliminating sources of error, and minimizing friction losses. Just as with technical lubricants. These only become high-performance lubricants through the addition of additives. The small inconspicuous additives contribute to improving emergency and cold running properties, increasing temperature resistance, further reducing friction, etc.
So if you were to add small IT additives to the ongoing processes in the company, the efficiency increases rapidly. Thus, the result of our observation was summarized quite simply: Finding relevant manufacturing and commercial information quickly and easily to validate prices, quotes, and resources increases efficiency by much more than 20%. The additive here would be a methodology of finding distributed information quickly and efficiently.
Exemplary for this success is the company HAVLAT Präzisionstechnik GmbH, which has permanently held its ground in a highly competitive market that is under particular price pressure. The manufacturing service provider for precision components has significantly increased its efficiency by means of a small IT additive. At the same time, this IT additive does not lead to any additional expense.
Read more about the success story of HAVLAT Präzisionstechnik here.
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