Powder coating
CoatR: software for a powder coating company
At CoatR the administration trailed behind the work instead of staying ahead of it. We wrote the system in which an order comes in, is costed, goes onto the coating line and comes out again as an invoice.
- What changed
- One system instead of separate lists
- What it covers
- Order, costing, planning, shop floor, packing slip and invoice
- Who works with it
- Office and production, in the same data
The situation
A powder coating company works to order: material comes in, is pretreated, coated and collected again. Every step needs its own data, and that data was kept in different places. An order sat in the mailbox, the costing in a spreadsheet, the planning in the office and the progress in the heads of the people on the line.
That works, until someone asks where an order is. Then somebody has to go and look. And because every step was entered again, the administration was always half a day behind reality.
What we built
The whole chain in one system
Not delivered in one go, but link by link, starting with the part that took the most time.
Order entry and costing
An incoming job is entered once, together with its costing. From that moment on everyone works with the same data and nobody has to copy it over.
Planning the coating line
Work is scheduled on the line, visible to both the office and the shop floor. The sequence and capacity are in one place instead of on a whiteboard.
Registration on the shop floor
What has been coated is registered the moment it happens, on the floor itself. As a result the status of an order is up to date without anyone having to ask.
Packing slips and invoices
At the end of the chain the packing slip and the invoice come out of the same data. No retyping, and no difference between what was delivered and what was invoiced.
What it delivered
The most important change is that data is now entered only once. What is recorded with the order carries through all the way to the invoice, so there can no longer be a difference between what was agreed, what was done and what is charged.
- The status of an order is up to date, because the shop floor updates it during the work.
- Office and production look at the same data, so status questions no longer need to be passed around.
- The process lives in the system rather than in the head of one colleague, so holidays or illness no longer bring the administration to a halt.
The technology
The system is built with Laravel and runs in the browser, so it works just as well on a tablet at the line as on a computer in the office. The source code is owned by CoatR.
Does this process sound familiar? Read how we automate business processes, or see the overview of custom business software.
Does your process also run through four different tools?
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