How To Introduce Concurrent Engineering Into Your Business

This is another genius webinar. For those who know our webinars by now, you should be aware that we hold webinars about once every month, approximately. So this week, we’re going to be talking about producing faster with simultaneous engineering. For those of you who don’t know me, usually my colleague Frank is the one who does all these webinars, and I I wanted to be part of this webinar because this is a subject that I really appreciate. It has to do with engineering, which really is my personal background, and how you can be more efficient by integrating simultaneous engineering practices in your business. So just a little bit about me before we get started. Like I said, my name is Max. I will be the host for this meeting. I’ve been with genius for around seven years now, started with a company implementing the software. Ultimately, I was project director managing a team of consultants and made my way to the sales side, the dark side of the force.

Bottom line here, I guess, I’m just trying to help Genius ERP users in any way possible. That’s really all that matters for me. I come from an engineering background. I used to design race and process control skids for pharmaceutical industry before. Someone who loves mountain biking. I got two sweet daughters, and I’m a pretty hands-on type of guy. But you know what? That’s enough about me for today. Let’s get going on our webinar here. I wanted to start this webinar with a quote that I learned in university I thought it’s somewhat a bit of a parody here, but some of it, to me, holds a certain truth. I wanted to share it with you before we get started because it is ultimately engineering here will be one of the main subject of our webinar. I’m just going to read it for you guys. Engineering is the art of modeling materials we do not wholly understand into shapes we cannot precisely analyze so as to withstand forces, we cannot not properly assessed in such a way that the public has no reason to suspect the extent of our ignorance. I thought that was pretty funny because it does have a certain truth to it.

Let’s cover our agenda for today. First, I’m going to introduce to you who is Genius ERP. Now, for those of you who’ve joined us before in these webinars, don’t worry, this usually is pretty quick. It should take about two or three minutes. So in case you’re listening to this recorded after the fact, just forward two minutes to skip the introduction and you guys will be fine. Then we will explore the reasons for you being here today, essentially. So what is concurrent engineering. We also call it simultaneous engineering. Really, it’s the same thing. And how can you use it to produce faster? After explaining what concurrent engineering is, we’ll explore what elements you need to consider to implement concurrent engineering in your business. And we’ll talk about some of the tools and techniques to adopt to facilitate the concurrent engineering integration in your organization. And at last, we’ll explore how these tools and techniques can be implemented in a ERP to help you guys implement concurrent engineering. So the presentation should last about 25, 30 minutes, and then we’ll move into So GeniusERP, and we’ll show you guys how that all integrates within the system. So let’s start with the introduction quickly.

So we’ve been genius for those of you who don’t know who we are. We’ve been helping essentially manufacturers improve their process and grow their business for more than 30 years now. We’re 100 % Canadian-based company. We take pride in serving our community and have found our niche… Sorry, Our niche market really is working with medium-sized manufacturers, small and medium-sized manufacturers, offering complete ERP solution for engineering to cash. For those of you who we talked before, you must know by now that we specialize in three different manufacturing formats, mainly ETO, which stands for high mix, low volume engineering to order, make to order, and configure to order manufacturers. This is really where our product shines. A little bit about the company history. So it was founded in 1989. It was offered… Originally, it was a consulting service company, so mainly industrial engineering. So our roots are pretty deep in the engineering background. Fast forward all the way to 1995, was when we first release a genius manufacturing ERP. That used to be a DOS version. For those of you who might have used DOS systems in the past. And again, fast forward all the way to 2006.

And this is really where there’s a new software direction and a and Latin-American focus. And I would even say probably an even greater focus on ETOs, MTOs, and CTOs. So really specializing in that specific industry. So as far as who we are, 30 plus years in the business working with manufacturers. It’s very simple. All our customers are manufacturers. That’s all we do. So we’re 110 employees, I think, as of today. Tens of thousands of users who use the software on a daily basis. And I think the number here that really is the one that you guys should pay attention is the 96 % customer retention. So it’s important to understand that the customers that we deal with, they stay with us for a while. So we create lasting partnerships because we have dedicated service to the industry, because we are involved in the manufacturing business, we make sure that our product is adopted and evolves with the business, with the sector as well, with the industry, manufacturing industry. You probably already know, for those of you who’ve already been part of the video before, maybe search a little bit about us that from past webinars, we’ve talked about different things in the past: scheduling, quality, process tracking, data visibility.

If you haven’t had the chance to visualize this information, I invite you guys to listen to some of our previous great webinars on those topics. Probably my colleague Frank is the one who’s giving them, but some of them have pretty good topics, and they also may have a significant impact on what we’re going to be talking today. So obviously, we’re going to be trying to focus on engineering, but keep in mind that other topics might be of interest for you. So you can just go on our website here, GeniusERP. Com, and under the Resource section here, you’ll find all the webinars. We’re pretty honest and transparent about our system. Sometimes you see out there some other systems, you don’t really get to see the system at all, or just very small print screens of what the system is. We’re pretty open about what we offer. We know we have a good product, so you guys can just go into the webinar section, you’ll be able to see pretty much everything about our system. I invite you to visit that website if you’re interested in learning more. All right, You know what? Let’s go in our main topic here.

What is concurrent engineering? Concurrent engineering is a method of designing and developing products. Typically, what you’re used to seeing is rather than running the process in a company, in an ETO company, rather than running it consecutively like this, you’ll try to run some of these stages simultaneously, not necessarily in parallel, but trying to start some of these process simultaneously. The idea here is actually pretty simple when you think about it. Ultimately, what you want to do is you want to save time, decrease your product development time, and also your time to market because that will lead typically to improve productivity and it will reduce your cost as well. You have to understand that concurrent engineering is a long term business strategy. So it’s not something you just the next day say, we’re going to do concurrent engineering. That’s not how it works. And the benefits are long term benefits as well. You’re not going to get short term benefits with that type strategy, there are going to be long term benefits. And very often the reason why we don’t necessarily see companies implementing concurrent engineering in their company is mainly because the initial implementation can be quite challenging.

So And the reasons for that, and we’ll see that later, is because of all the information that we have to manage and how we need to structure the company in order to be able to implement such a strategy in your business. So Ultimately here, what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to remove the need to have multiple design rework, and we’re doing that by creating an environment for designing a product the first time around. So really, this is what we’re trying to achieve. Now, You might be asking yourself why you need concurrent engineering in your ETO organization. There are multiple factors why you’d want to integrate this type of strategy in your business. I think the first thing is there’s an increasing product variety and technical complexity that prolong the product development process and make it more difficult to predict the impact of design decisions on the functionality and also the performance of the final product. So that’s one thing. I think the other thing is we’re seeing increasing global competitive pressure. And what we’re seeing is that that results from an emerging concept of reengineering or reverse engineering. You’re going to get a competitor who is going to be looking at your product, trying to replicate it and try to sell it at a lower price, lower quality, but they’re doing it faster than you guys.

So we’re seeing this in the market, and the reason why you want to implement a strategy like this will also benefit that type of competition. The other thing is the need for rapid response to fast changing customer demand. And I’m sure you guys, you all know what I mean when I say that. They need for a shorter product lifecycle. You want your time to market to be as short as possible. Also, I think emerging technologies, new and innovative technologies, there are emerging at such a high rate today. They’re causing new product to be technologically obsolete within a short period of time. It really depends what type of product you’re manufacturing. But a lot of companies we deal with today are in automation, skids, capital equipment, all that stuff. We’re seeing more and more technology being involved in those products. It takes just a few months and your competition is already ahead of you in some of this technology. All these things today are reasons why you want to look at concurrent engineering as a best practice in your business. In today’s webinar, I will demonstrate how these different tools and techniques can be integrated as standard functionalities in an ERP system, which will in turn facilitate the implementation of this type of strategy in your organization.

So let’s look at what are the fundamentals of concurrent engineering? There are four important elements of concurrent engineering, which are, I would say, driving forces. So things that you need to consider when you want to implement concurrent engineering. So the first thing is cross-functional teams. So obviously, So you see cross-functional teams include people from different area of the workplace. They’re all involved in a particular process. So for example, engineering, manufacturing, procurement, sales, marketing, and so on, so forth. So that’s the first thing. You want to be able to have cross-functional teams working on a project. So that’s something that you have to consider. Now, there are going to be pros and cons of doing this. And there are tools that you guys need to put in place for efficient cross-functional team structure. The second thing is what we call concurrent product realization. That goes really with the title of concurrent engineering. It’s at the core of what concurrent engineering is. That is doing several things at once, such as designing various subsystems simultaneously And that is really critical to reducing your design time. That, as I said, is really at the heart of concurrent engineering.

That is one of the main topics here. Now, if you’re going to be doing concurrent product realization, you also want to consider incremental information sharing. So what that means is sharing information incrementally. It helps minimize the chance that concurrent product realization will lead to surprises. So you’re working If you’re working on something and if someone is working on procurement and doesn’t have technical specs yet for some of the stuff that you need to build, obviously that will lead to some issues down the road. So incremental meaning that as soon as new information becomes available, it is shared and integrated into the design right away. So you want that to be as efficient as possible. And cross-functional teams are important to the effective sharing of information, as I mentioned earlier, so that it all happens in a in a timely fashion. The last thing we need to consider here is integrated product management. What that means is integrated project management, it ensures that someone is responsible for the entire project, and that responsibility is not handed off once one aspect of the work is done. You want someone who’s going to be in charge of the entire thing, a project manager, rather than have a engineering department who’s going to be working on something, they’re going to be designing, CAD drafting, drafting.

Once all drawings are done, pack it, throw it in production and say, We’re done. Let’s move to something else. You don’t want that to happen. We’ll talk about how we can work with that. We’ll keep these four elements here in mind because they’re going to be driving factors for the rest of the presentation. Let’s talk about tools and techniques in concurrent engineering. Here, I think I want to put focus on three things that we need to think about when we’re going to be integrating tools like this in an IT system for you to be able to implement this strategy in your business. The first one might sound a little Not really, but computer and IT-based tools and your design approach really have a big impact on concurrent engineering. The reason why we put IT tools in here is because these tools, they really help us integrate these four fundamentals that we saw earlier. Centralizing data, we don’t want to have data silos. That is true for material properties, for bombs, for just communication altogether. You want to have everything in the same place so that everyone sees the same information and everyone’s taking decisions based on the same information.

So IT tools are really something important to consider here, and we’ll talk a little bit about that in details on the next slide. The other thing is we just talked about it, so integrated project management and communication. This is important because you want to be able to define deliverables, and that is going to be true for all departments. And one of the things that we see very often in companies that we work with is deliverables are really well defined as far as production is concerned, procurement, anything that has to do with building the equipment and shipping it, well defined deliverables. What people lack, typically, is well-defined deliverables in engineering and making sure they’re accountable for these deliverables and they understand the impact that they have in the entire project. We’ll talk about that later as well. Finally, I wrote production here, but really the topic that we have to consider here is streamline design to production. That is done by facilitating information flow between engineering department and essentially manufacturing. That is all operational today, and that is typically done in a ERP system. Let’s look at some of the integrated IT tools that you want to see in an ERP system.

You have to think about this with two different approach. The first thing on the left here is what I’m going to be calling the engineering engineering area. Then on the right side of the screen is what we’re going to be calling operations management. The reason why I separated it this way is because what we’re seeing out there when we talk with customers is there’s usually a pretty significant gap that exists between these two things. On this side, on the engineering side, things are happening. A concept is being defined, a model is being created. But on the operation side, we’re not really sure exactly what’s happening, when they’re going to be done, what has been designed, what has not been designed yet? Are there things that we can start producing? Purchasing is saying, should I be purchasing a long lead time item right now? Or should I wait till you’re done your design to do that? There’s usually a pretty significant the gap that exists between these two. What you want to consider in your ERP is you want to consider that these two things should not have a gap. They should be communicating efficiently together and the information should flow from one side to the other as efficiently as possible.

So if we look at the engineering side, typically what we’re going to see is, and this is what we see out there, there might be more, obviously, but these are the things that we see most often. So Modeling approach in a CAD system. We want… Most of our customers here in ETO organization have CAD systems. They model their products, they model their subsystems, their manufactured parts. Everything pretty much is model, and We get to see some very simple models, and we get to see some very complex models. And the CAD here gives us the ability to define essentially the structure of our model, of our project. At the same time, it helps us define what is going to be the BOM. It also helps us define what we call predecessor-successor and relationships within a BOM. In other words, we know if there is a subsystem that the subsystem must be fabricated or manufactured before it is assembled on the final product. This information is all captured in a 3D CAD model. And that is an important tool that we see often today. The other thing that we see is more and more, we’re seeing people do this internally.

Before it used to be outsourced, but FEA analysis, finite element analysis. You Now, I’d be wondering, what does it have to do with the ERP? Well, the thing is with FEA, you try to identify proper materials and design choices. Now, obviously, design choices and materials will have an impact on operations, management, and production, because ultimately, you’re going to be driving either purchasing for a stock or raw material, and also you’re going to be… Design choices will affect how much time is required to build something. Machining aluminum and machining titanium is not the same thing. So FEA, we’re seeing a lot more of these things happening today in the business. And we want to, here at GENIUS, we want to make sure that we the information and the properties that you can extract from this type of analysis and make sure that they flow through the ERP system. The last thing that we see here at the top is CAM system, computer-assisted manufacturing. Identifying the proper stock to start with. Is it going to be a two-inch round bar or two and a quarter-inch round bar? These are things that you guys can define in a CAM system.

You want to be able to identify proper processes to apply to a part. Are we going to be doing this on a five-axis CNC? Does it need to be cut, bent, weld? All these things you guys can do in a CAM system. The other thing that we can get out of this is a program. Typically, a CAM system will generate a program that you can insert into a CNC, and the program will run essentially to manufacture the part. And all of this, typically, we’ll see more and more customers trying to integrate what we call PLMs, right? Vaults, PDM. There’s a bunch of them. Windchill. So what does the PLM really do? Well, it does a bunch of things, but for us, there’s really two things that it manages really well. Revision management and properties definition. So all these properties that you’re getting from all these systems should be attached to the part, the subsystem or the product, and that should be hosted in a PLM system. And Then on the other end, we want information in the ERP system that is going to be necessary for these cross-functional teams that we talked about earlier. The design choices in the BOM that will come from a CAD The CAD system, the material selection that will come from the FEA and the CAM, the routing steps that are going to come from the CAM system.

All these processes are coming from the engineering side and are being defined here on the right side. The BOM that you get from the CAD system produces a shopping list. We want to make sure that whenever it flows through genius or through any ERP, that procurement is well aware of what they need to purchase. Whether it be something that’s already defined in the BOM or a long lead item that I’m going to define in the BOM at some point. Project management, integrated project management, was something that was very important earlier. That needs to be included in the ERP as well. Talk about accounting. How much should we invoice? How much did we progress on this job? What was the original budget? What is the engineering budget? What is the current cost? So these things should be part of the ERP. Centralized communication. Customer called. Drawing approval is not approved, so we need to go rework. So these things need to be in there. And then I need the document management. I need to be able that the customer did not approve the drawing or that the customer did approve the drawing. So that’s all part of the IT-based tools.

And these are things that we want to have in the system, and they’re going to cover those fundamentals that we talked about earlier. The other thing we said is we want to have integrated project management. That was one of the tools and techniques that we talked about. How do you do that? You do that by making sure that you have project milestones. And that project milestones not only drive project management, but also drive different different aspects of a project, engineering, production, purchasing. They’re all tied together and they have a date. They could have a critical end date and a buffer zone. Each of them may have a responsible person someone who’s going to be responsible for that milestone. They’re centered on our project and we really need to make sure everyone is having the same view here as far as project management goes. The other thing we need to consider, workflows. Why do you talk about workflows? Because workflows help us determine where we are, what is the status of each of these system and subsystem in our project. So I have a machine, it’s sitting on a frame. The frame is designed, it’s complete customer approved, I’m still working on the machine.

I should be able to start producing the frame. Now, how do I define that in a system so that people are that this is ready to release. I could print drawings and then issue them to the floor. That’s one thing that you can do. Or you can have a workflow system in your ERP, which will trigger actions based on what your responsibilities are. That’s something else that we have. You want to integrate in your system. Budgets, pretty self-explanatory. If you have your project manager, this is what we sold. Engineering says it’s going to It cost this, and this is what it really cost. You want to have this view available all the time. This is what we sold. Engineering just pushed a bomb in the system. This is where we’re at with budget so far. We’re way off. We thought we were going to be a couple of thousand dollars in hardware, and you guys put in graded bolts on everything. We can’t do it. So something that we need to consider here as well. And finally, communication project management. Project managers need to be able to communicate to all these cross-functional teams efficiently. So we want to have that in the system as well.

And finally here, this one is pretty simple. Streamlined engineering to production. And a proper ETO system allows for concurrent engineering by allowing production while still working on design. That is really important. A lot of systems that is out there will not allow you to start producing until design is completed, and that cannot happen in a concurrent engineering or simultaneous engineering environment. You want your system to be able to do partial releasing and to be able to compare at all time what we have in production versus where engineering is at. This is paramount to the concurrent engineering process. I think we have a pretty good understanding of of what concurrent engineering is. Now, you’re probably wondering, how do we integrate that in a system so that I can implement this type of strategy in my organization? The great news is for you guys is We see RP as these key functionalities and techniques built in the application. All the tools that we’ve discussed so far, the things that we’ve mentioned, are part of our system, and that is there’s no add-on or additional modules required implement these things. They’re part of what we’re going to be talking.

What I’m going to do for the next few minutes, I’m just going to jump in our system here. I’m just going to quickly change my screen and grab water. Awesome. I think the first place I want to start here is Let’s start from the very beginning. We have a customer that calls us, and we’re a company that manufactures automated bottling solutions. And a customer calls us and they say, I need a capping machine, which is going to be able to cap 100 bottles per… I’m going to say per minute. So 100 bottles per minute. So we have requirements. We have probably dimensions, probably maybe specifications from a customer. He’s used to working with Siemens, he’s used to working with Alan Bradley, whatever. From there, we have to give him a price, and we have to quote a project, and then we have to deliver the project afterwards. We’re going to use a quoting system, and a quoting system is going to allow us to present a quote to the customer and say, This is what it’s going to cost you for this type of system, Mr. Customer. Now, in Genius, what we do here is we’re going to go one step further than the quote.

We want to go into a functionality that’s going to allow us to estimate what the product is. Then ultimately, you want that functionality to be at the core of everything that’s going to happen afterwards. What are you seeing on the screen here is a quote in genius that was generated for a customer we call Custom Comfort. The first thing that we did is we created a project because we’re talking simultaneous engineering, project management, integrated project management. So we created a project which we assigned to this quote, and this project is going to be central to everything that’s going to be happening after because the project in genius really will be capturing all the information that is related to that specific project, so genius webinar, right? Who’s the customer? What are our dates? Who is the project manager? In this case, Tiger Wood. So interesting. And We’re going to be seeing everything that we quoted during this project, everything that we turn into our order, whether it be the original product or original equipment or a change order. Everything that we might have charged as cost plus, which is time and material might happen. Everything that was a fixed price, everything that we’re manufacturing, everything that we may be sold or reselled as a purchase good or a spare part, all our invoices, all our payments, you want everything in the same And that is going to be important because that specific project will follow through every transaction that are going to be following this quote.

So when we quote this machine, what we want to do is we want to have a central location where we’re going to be capturing everything that relates to how we came up with the engineering. And in genius, we do that by attaching what we call an engineering document to every line that you’re going to have on a quote or an order of our job. So And that engineering document is essentially one of the fundamental modules in genius. Why is it important? Because it’s at the center of everything that we talked about earlier. Let me explain. We’re designing a machine here, and obviously, we sold it to the customer, so we’re going to assume we sold it. We want to be able to establish establish with this customer and with everyone internally, everything that we need to be able to do this project. Here we have to think about your simultaneous engineering mindset. We’re going to have cross-functional teams. First thing, cross-functional teams means engineering is going to be participating in this. How does engineering participate? They define the model, as you see here on a tree view. They participate by defining routing steps, as we said earlier.

They participate by defining perinary purchases, by attaching drawings, by defining things that need to be launched in production right away, by telling us where they are on the design by using workflow steps. So right now, I have my bearing tool, which is release to production. So it’s ready to release to production because prior to that, it was work in progress, which was then released by engineering to be approved by a customer, and it is now approved so it can be released to production. I can also come back from production with engineering change order that needs review. It is under review until it is ongoing and validated to be released again. These things are workflows that we talked about earlier, can be applied to essentially any step in the process where you can capture this information, and that can be used to tell who’s going to be part of this engineering document where we stand as far as the project is concerned. Then your project management is going to be using something called milestones, defining major milestones for the project, telling us when they need to happen and who is going to be responsible for each of these milestones.

Everyone’s going to have their date, their critical end date, and a certain budget associated to their milestone so that they know when they need to start and when they need to finish and how much time they have to do it. In our accounting is going to say, Well, when we sold this, we had a budget in mind. This is what the budget looked like. If you guys are going to be pushing material in here from engineering, better make sure our structural doesn’t go above $4,000. Because our sales price is based on this cost here, plus markups, obviously. So all this information is within one single entity here. And this entity will always follow your project, whether it be currently in quotes, approve as a sales order, you got your PO, or even in production. So this is very important. As this flows from a quote and gets converted to a sales order, that information, the sales price and the cost, still tied to that engineering document. That will generate a job for us. The job, and you see here, we still have our project associated. If we go on the project, we now see that we have an order that was generated from that quote.

If we move to our job, we now see that the job that was generated holds all this information. This is the job. This is the part that we’re creating. This is the order. This is the PO. This is the quote. This is the engineering document. Here’s your project. Everything The job that we talked about is central. Again, in one single window, everyone sees the same thing. Once it gets launched into a job, what happens? Incremental information sharing. As we release these things, you want to make sure that budget is affected, production knows that we have something to produce, even procurement. Procurement needs to know that we need to purchase things. They’re going to come in here and they’re going to be saying, Hold on. Everything in red is in shortage, everything in green I have on hand. So now I can take action. I can use this information to start purchasing. Even better in that, I haven’t released yet the information But the customer tells me they want Alan Bradley drives, and it’s a five horsepower drive because we calculated it. So I’m just going to put it as a preliminary purchase because these are eight weeks long items.

So you can define your list of items that you need to purchase right away before your job has even started, and you can get going on those right away in procurement. They’re going to be assigned to the job, and whenever they show up in your bomb somewhere, we’re going to make sure that they’re redistributed and they’re not bought a second time around. So all this thing makes a lot of sense. Now, how do you have this information flow from engineering all the way to the ERP system? For those of you who’ve participated in earlier webinars I’m sure you’ve seen the… There’s an entire webinar on catabomb, which shows you guys essentially the tool that we have available to transfer information from a CAD system. I didn’t want to spend too much time today on explaining what catabomb does. I just wanted to remind you guys that whenever you use cat to bomb, so this is, remember, a plugin that we have in a CAD system, and we’re going to be mapping properties from your model all the way back to the ERP system. And properties here, you have to think really on a large scale.

We’re not talking about part number and description. We’re talking about part number, description, weight, raw material requirements, routing steps, workflow steps. All this stuff that you can think of that you need for a bomb will be managed directly from this application here. And just to make sure we all understand each other, we resolve the model here based on what we see in the CAD. The properties are then transferred from the CAD to Genius, and you can always tie it back to that BOM or engineering document that we were just talking about. You see, I’m currently going to be sending this over into BOM version 112, which is related to that quote. Bom version 112, if we go back to our job here, just so we’re all on the same page, is this one right here. This is related to BOM version 119 that comes from engineering document. The information I’m going to pushing from the CAD is going to end up in that BOM. And the beauty with this engineering document is the fact that it’s not necessarily a standard BOM library. It’s a specific project, a specific BOM associated to a quote that we’re doing.

So in other words, I could have built a capping machine before. I could have used a standard capping machine that I’ve built before, create a version of that and then change it based on the new design, and that would not affect the original capping equipment that I have in my library, in my PLM. So the way that we built the system really closely resembles how you guys will do things in engineering tools that you have available. So ultimately, here, what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to push information from the CAD or the model or all these IT tools that you have in the engineering side and make sure they end up in genius. And once they’re in genius and we’ve defined all the information in the engineering document, we just need really a tool that’s going to compare what we have in engineering and what we have in the ERP system. Here what we did as an example, I talked to you about workflow steps earlier. We pushed some of this information from the BOM or from the to the ERP system. And some of them are already released by engineering, and that tells our project manager that they need to get a signature for this component here, for this subsystem or major subsystem.

It also tells my project manager that engineering is still working on this tensioner subsystem here because it is work in process. How do they know that? Well, because when they push from the CAD, that was still tagged as work in process. Same with engineering here. Release for engineering. We check it in the PLM or the vault. As we check it in, we assign it a workflow. That workflow is essentially the same as the ERP system. It is a bilateral communication channel. If it gets approved in here, that gets updated in the CAD as well afterwards. The communication that happens between the two system has to be as efficient and as seamless as possible. These are the tools that we’ve built that help you do that. You see here, this one is released for production. That means the customer has a proof production for this one, and this one is under review. There’s currently a change order on the machine frame. It was released prior. Now there’s an issue, we can fix it, but at least we know that this is currently under review. When we’re ready to launch this into In production, what happens? Well, if we go back to our job here, we do see that this subsystem does not currently have a work order.

It is reserved on a job. We know there’s this subsystem that we need to complete. Now, when I have drawings approved and ready to release, the BOM is there The routing steps are there, the methods for fabricating everything that you need in order to build it is in the engineering document. All you have to do at this point is add from the engineering document. Here, again, something very simple, very visual to help you identify what you need to release. Production manager comes in, looks at all our jobs. What is ready to release the production today? Well, this one is under change order. I’m going to ignore it. Release for production. Perfect. I’m going to produce this guy. Released by engineering, still waiting for drawing approval. Work in progress, still waiting for drawing approval. So you know what? I’m going to confirm this. And by doing that, effectively, what I’m doing is I’m releasing a new work instruction, a new work order to start building this subsystem. So that way I can increment my job with new subsystems and with new requirements as we keep the design going. So that allows me to do that concurrent product realization.

And if we look at our milestones here, we’ve We find milestones to everyone. We have responsibles, person responsible for each milestone. We have our project manager. We have our engineering here that is managed by Patrick Arouin, our purchasing by Kamward. Everything that has to do with inventory and picking, Anna Korynkova. Programming, assembly and fat, Ron Exall, and shipping, Anna Korynkova as well. Each of them have an estimated amount of time and a date, critical end date, that they need to make sure that they finish this thing by. Everyone is responsible for defining their progression, how much they’ve done so far. When you look at a project, you’re able to And you see, out of the 15 hours remaining, I’m 50 % complete. So not only are they providing accurate information in order to control our project, they’re also, when they’re doing that, driving driving scheduling because we’re scheduling with budgets here. We’re building custom machines. We can’t schedule with standard times on routing steps. We have to schedule with budgets, milestones, and this is how we do it. So we define all these things. And then ultimately, what we want to do is we want to look at our budget.

So budget captured originally from the document, brought over on this side. And now I can look at my cost progression on each of these cost categories that we defined originally. So we have what we sold, what we engineered, and what we actually did as built. And this is an evolving cost It is live data in the system. So in other words, when I start assembling something, I go out for lunch, my project has just progressed by X dollars, and that is updated automatically in the system. Same goes for parts, raw material, all these different things will be allocated to the job through purchase orders, through inventory consumption, all the different ways that you can backflush materials into your system or frontflush or use that point of service. So we have evolving budgets or accounting is happy, project manager is happy here. And ultimately here, you’re looking at profitability on this and then sales and marketing saying, we’re doing big bucks on these projects, guys. We got to keep going on these and market these, right? So this is all information that’s going to be available for them. And we might be making big bucks, but they’re very, very hard projects.

And maybe we’re seeing that through different ways in the system. We’re late on all these milestones. We’re doing money, but it’s tough on the company. Maybe we don’t want to put our efforts on these type of products. So all this information, again, flows from engineering to the CAD, and they’re all centralized in one location. No data silos here. All communication is centralized in the system. Documents are all attached here. You want to see your drawings. Everything went through the system, the engineering system, all the way to the ERP system. So we got our drawings in here. And that’s going to be true, whether it be drawings, tooling, setups, specs, inspections, all this stuff will follow through here. We want to make sure that everyone is aware of what they need to do on each of these ask. So guys, I think that covers what I wanted to show today. I think it In conclusion, what I want to do is I want to talk a little bit about the benefits. There are notable benefits of Concrete Engineering when you try to integrate it in your company. I think the first thing that we want to talk about is competitive advantage.

We did talk about that a little bit earlier, but reduction in time to market means that businesses will gain an edge over their competition. This is something that we we talked about earlier. Enhance productivity. If you discover problems earlier in the process, they can be corrected sooner rather than at later stage in the development process. So that there are different engineering process. So that’s something that I think is very important in the process or one of the major benefits. And the last thing here is, and this one is pretty obvious, is decreased design and development time. And that’s probably where most of our customers are The reason why most of our customers want to introduce this type of strategy in their business. Because what we hear very often is engineering takes forever before we can get drawings out and start producing. We’re hearing these things very often. So make products which they will match your customers’ needs, but in less time and at a reduced cost because it’s taking you less time to manufacture them. If there’s The one takeaway here, I think for this webinar is if you run an ETO business, high mix, low volume, engineer to order business, make sure your ERP has all the tools required to implement concurrent engineering practice in your organization because there’s no reason why you wouldn’t want to implement such a strategy.

I wanted to make sure we had a few minutes left so that we could take some questions. For everyone What is left here on the line, if ever you have a question, there should be a question or even the chat, if you guys want to use the chat. I can take any questions now if you guys would like to ask questions. There’s We have a question here by an anonymous user. What CAD system do you integrate with? We integrate with a few, mainly Dassault systems, CAD systems. So SolidWorks, for example, and Autodesk products. So for example, Inventor. Are some of the products that we integrate with. Any other questions? Must have done a pretty compelling job. Must have been really clear. I think everyone’s just running out and going to their boss and saying, We need this simultaneous engineering thing in our company, man. Either that or they’re saying, We need genius. Do you have any plans to integrate with additional systems on Shape, specifically? Definitely, yeah. We’re always looking at integrating with new systems. Onshape is one of the newest systems out there. If I remember correctly, I think that’s the one that you run from a web browser.

They have a pretty good system. Very interesting. We did look at it. We’re definitely looking at integrating with more systems in the future. This is one of the differentiators here at Genius, so definitely we’re looking at that. Any other questions? Maybe 30 seconds. It’s no question. I think we’re going to close it for today. Okay, I don’t see any other open questions. So thank you very much, everyone, for being here with us today. If you have any questions, just write. If you’re currently in a process of integrating a new system or you’re already talking with us through a sales representative, obviously, you can discuss this matter with your sales representative. If you guys want to ever write to me, here’s my email address. It’s mlorews@geniuserp. Com. Or if you just have a general question about genius or general inquiries, say hello@geniuserp. Com. Thank you guys for joining us today. We’ll meet you guys in the next webinar. Thank you. Take care.