The gifts are unwrapped and the egg nog bottle is dried up, we’re back to work. It’s 2016 and time for a new post. Happy New Year to all of our clients and loyal blog followers!
One of the latest projects on my task list has some exciting possibilities for companies who specialize in manufacturing their own products. Companies who produce their own retail goods have very strict guidelines to follow during the manufacturing process. A short term used for this process is the “Recipe.” The recipe contains each step, every setting and the task list involved in the process of efficiently producing a consumable good. Additionally, the process needs to be quality checked and proofed for consistency.
In order for a product to be ready to sell the recipe and quality control processes must be completed. The created product only receives it’s new SKU number once the product has completed every step. Vtiger by default has the ability to track SKU numbers and completed, ready to sell products. So why not add the ability to track the process that leads up to the creation of the SKU? One of our clients tasked us to do just that.
In order to accomplish our client’s requirements we needed to come up with a method to track from start to finish of the birth of a new product. In this task we created a “Production Specification” module that has version tracking and quality control related modules. The Version tracking had to meet very stringent requirements to match a compliance request. One of these requirements was the process of automatically incrementing the version number. Products that begin with a recipe will inevitably have their recipe updated as the process is refined and corrected to achieve maximum efficiency. Each time the recipe is adjusted, the version of that recipe is incremented. This allows our client to reference time stamps of the version increments when fine tuning the production process. If they make an adjustment that yields more production then the version is automatically incremented and the next time that product is created they can take advantage of the new settings contained within the latest recipe revision.
To complete the job we added the ability for quality control to run their inspections and sign off on the production. In what we consider a very elaborate form, the CRM allows the client to assign multiple columns and rows based on the inspection requirements. At the bottom of every column is a window where the user can digitally sign off and permantly save/lock the inspection. This type of inspection process met the compliance guidelines and satisfied the requirements.
Our client is excited about the work in addition to looking forward to increased efficiency and better granular level control over their entire manufacturing process.
Do you have a similar request? Do you have a task that you need guidance on but can’t find the answer to? I love a challenge and would look forward to talking to you about improving or assisting your business’ workflow.
Please contact us.
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