When you boil it down to essentials, a successful job shop sends out its jobs on time and makes money on every job. Getting to this point can be difficult, especially if your shop uses paper to track everything. It’s hard to know if you made money on a job if you don’t know how much it costs to run a job. And it’s hard to know how long a job will take if you can’t compare it to similar jobs you’ve done in the past. Below are four things that successful job shops do to get their jobs out on time and make money.
Jobs Go Out on Time
The best way to guarantee jobs go out on time is to make sure you schedule them correctly. There are two big parts to ensuring correct job scheduling. Firstly, when the job comes to your shop, the person doing the estimating needs good information about how long the job will take. When the job gets accepted, the person doing the scheduling needs to have an accurate idea of what jobs your shop has and where they will be on the shop floor. If both these things happen, then your jobs are much more likely to go out on time. However, sometimes customers call in with rush jobs.
Rush Jobs Get Scheduled
When a customer calls in with a rush job, are you able to look at your shop’s schedule and see what would happen if you took that job? If the answer is no, then you’re making things harder than they need to be. With good ERP software, you can not only have all your jobs scheduled, but you can do “what if” scheduling. “What if” scheduling lets you see what your schedule would look like if you took on a job without changing the schedule. You can check your schedule and then put it back to the way it was with just a few clicks. With software like this, your shop can confidently take on or turn down rush jobs and know that it’s the best thing for your shop.
Knowledge Is Shared
When shops are looking to improve, one of the big things they look at is the shop floor’s flow. If all employees know what they need to do next, jobs flow through smoothly. If employees must find out what they need to do next or end up doing the wrong thing because the schedule has changed, jobs don’t flow smoothly, and they end up late. With ERP software, employees can look at the schedule in real-time and see what they need to do, even if the schedule has changed since that morning.
Estimates Are Accurate
Estimating is critical in a job shop, both in assessing time and price for a job. If the time isn’t estimated correctly, the job could be late. If the price isn’t calculated accurately, the shop could lose money on a job or have a price that’s too high to be competitive. With ERP software, estimators can see how long similar jobs have taken and how much they should charge for them. If your shop had done that job before, no matter how long ago it was, estimators can pull it up quickly and send back an accurate quote.
Successful job shops have all the tools they need to get jobs done correctly and quickly. Some of those tools are the machines on the shop floor, but some are computer programs. Good ERP software is indispensable to getting more jobs out on time and making money on them. Many job shops have ERP software. If yours doesn’t, the market will leave your shop behind.
