Description
Key Learnings
- Learn about Prodsmart as a tool, what industries it generally serves, where it fits, and where it doesn't.
- Learn about the Fusion 360 and Prodsmart integration.
- Learn how this tool can be used in high-mix, low-volume manufacturing environments.
Speaker
- DSDylan SmithDylan Smith is a manufacturing expert with over 10 years experience in the industry. Dylan has held numerous roles within Autodesk, today he's a Technical Sales Specialist focusing on Fusion 360 and Prodsmart.
DYLAN SMITH: Hi, everyone. I hope you're all doing well. First of all, a huge thanks to everyone for taking time out of their AU schedule to listen to me. My class this year is about the digitization of typical job shops. More specifically, it's about how the high mix, low-volume job shop world can go digital using Prodsmart. This has been an interesting topic for me ever since Autodesk's acquisition of Prodsmart last year.
Coming from this kind of background myself and knowing how much these kinds of shops could do with this technology, it's really inspired me to share knowledge and tips about the product and industry to further inspire the industry to move towards digital maturity. Before we get into the good stuff, like all classes you've been to this week, the safe harbor is simply here to say, no purchasing decisions should be made based on anything that I speak, but that isn't yet released.
So as a quick introduction to who I am, I'm Dylan Smith. And I've been involved in manufacturing in some way, shape, or form for over 10 years now. I started my career as an apprentice at Delcam, which was eventually acquired by Autodesk. And an apprentice in the UK gets their education alongside doing the physical job. So my job was learning how to use the equipment like manual mills, manual lathes, whilst trying to understand the intricacies of manufacturing in general.
After doing that for four years, I became a manufacturing specialist, then a senior manufacturing specialist, and then a team leader. I then moved into another role within Autodesk, where I worked closely with product teams in the customer engagement organization before moving to the United States to occupy the current role which I'm now in, which is technical sales specialist, which, by the way, is great.
I get to speak to customers every day, which allows me to keep up with the latest trends within the industry, understanding the way the industry is going, which I think somewhat gives me a unique perspective into a subsection of manufacturing. Somewhere along the way, I also went to University and got my engineering degree.
Now that you're more familiar with who I am, let me walk you through what we'll be discussing today. First of all, I'm sure there are some of you who aren't familiar with Prodsmart, or what it's designed to do, or the state of the industry. So we'll start there. After that, I want to talk about my motivation to talk about such a specific demographic, why high mix, low-volume job shops, why are they interesting?
I did somewhat allude to this. But we are going to go into depth on this topic. It's also worth getting ahead, and being very transparent, and talking about where this kind of tool definitely doesn't fit today. We'll look at how it integrates with Fusion 360 and finally get into the main topic of why Prodsmart specifically is a great tool for these types of businesses.
Let's talk about the problems that Prodsmart is trying to solve. Let's take some time to familiarize ourselves with the typical production workflow, starting from bidding on a job all the way through to completing the job and shipping it to our customers. There may be some slight nuances, which vary from company to company. But generally, this flow is going to ring true for almost every job shop.
To begin with, we want to quote the job or estimate it. We start off with a quote, which takes into consideration material cost, labor costs, machine cost. And it's also going to incorporate an element of our fixed costs like, let's say, rent. These are all variables that every quote needs to take into consideration, as well as how many we need to make. After that, we have the contract and sales process side. Once our bid gets accepted, we move into the planning phase. We look at where this fits into the schedule, what machine it goes on, who does it, and all the required admin around taking a job on.
Next, procurement. Assuming we don't have the material already in inventory, which is generally going to be the case with job shops due to several reasons, one of those being poor inventory management systems, which we won't get into right now, we need to procure material. We need to procure tooling, workholding, and any other third-party resources needed to complete the job.
Then, of course, we get to the main event. We move into the inevitable step, which is actually making the component or components. We need a production order. We need a plan, instructions. And we want status as we go through the production process. After it's made, what do we do then? Of course, we inspect it. Once the part's been made, we have to in some way, shape, or form take measurements. We cannot send an uninspected component to a customer. This is asking for trouble. So there's not a shop out there worth its salt that doesn't do this step.
And then, of course finally, once all of that's done, we need a way of logistically getting these components or component out to our customer. This may seem fairly simple. But the reason I've walked through this is to give a good understanding of what shop owners and production managers need to stay on top of the manufacturing process. Generally, if you visit a shop, all of this information will be kept in many different places. It will be on Excel documents, Word documents, paper, and many other different forms of disconnected documentation. The real question is, how can this process be linked and consolidated?
This image can be representative of a typical job shop and how the information is communicated between separate groups within the company. It's all highly disconnected, meaning tracking down information is difficult. This leads to critical information slipping through the cracks, which can really affect the company's way of operating and their reputation. I speak to companies on a daily basis who lose information on jobs, lose the actual physical job altogether, lose crucial paperwork, which either affects the bottom line or affects the relationship with the customer. This is not a unique problem in industry. This is very common.
Going back to the point, a lot of job shops don't have departments, which mean individuals wear many different hats. So instead of communicating, it's about trying to remember everything, which is just as much as a problem as disconnection between departments. So referring back to the previous slide, trying to coordinate all departments on a new job without missing crucial information which could lead to a loss can be very difficult. So this does sound like a bit of a problem. But what explicitly are some of the problems that arise from this disconnection?
I have somewhat alluded to this. But missed deadlines is a really easy one. Customer's [INAUDIBLE], they need it straight away. If we don't get it to them, they're going to be upset about it. So where is this information usually documented? In an Excel spreadsheet or a piece of paper, which doesn't prompt anyone to look at it. So it rarely ever gets opened, least of all provides good information to keep the business functional. Missed deadlines are a huge issue.
Parts being made from incorrect files. Where is all of this data centralized? Maybe we have a filing system set up on our PC. But how do we know which one's the latest one? Everything is far too disconnected. Low-profit margins. Do we have historical data to show what we're good at, what particular industries we thrive in, what individuals are the most productive? We suspect not. So how do we know where our biggest margins are? We don't.
Excessive scrap. Do we know who scraps the most, what machines scrap the most, what industries we don't thrive in? Exactly. We don't have our historical data. So it's very difficult for us to put our finger on it. If a customer comes to us and requested information on a job that we did three and 1/2 years ago, how easy, if at all, is it going to be to find that information?
I suspect that the way we do things today, it's going to be very difficult. So traceability issues are a huge issue with disconnection. And finally, damaged relationships. If our client or customer happens to find somebody who makes things quicker within the right specification, the chances of that customer dropping us due to us making mistakes is very high. So damaged relationship is absolutely a byproduct of disconnection.
What is the simplest way for us to deal with the issue of disconnection? Tracking production of some sort is a good way to start, even if it's antiquated and outdated like paper. By tracking even just the operations, the start time, the end time, the date, this gives supervisors and managers some data to work from in the future and does give our business an element of traceability, which is very important.
So this is what we're generally seeing in the market today. This is with Excel, again, paper, wherever it may be. People understand they need to track the most accessible tools that people have at their disposal are the Microsoft suite of tools and, of course, paper. But paper is by and large most common. So anyone who's ever stepped foot in a job shop, even for a week, a month, a very short period of time will understand and familiarize themselves with this piece of paper. It's very relevant.
These are the pieces of paper that flow off the backend of the production when the job's done. A couple of characteristics to look out for, timing accuracy is within 50%. Super messy handwriting. It looks like a child's written it and coffee stains all over it, making it difficult, if not impossible, to read. So yes, technically, these companies are tracking. But how useful is this information? And what downfalls are there to doing it this way?
So let's run through some of the major issues from tracking on paper. Number one, of course, it's hard to read or understand. And if we cannot read the information that's put onto the paper, then this is absolutely redundant. The benefit of the paper is to, at somewhere down the line, put that information into some sort of database like an Excel spreadsheet so we can, again, retrospectively look back and evaluate the success of projects.
Let's assume the information that's tracked on the paper is perfectly done, even to the millisecond. The handwriting is great. The timings are amazing. This is still not that useful. If we have a bottleneck or a job's delayed, the only way for us to find out about this is either by word of mouth or when the job is finished. And there's nothing we can do about the bottleneck once the job's finished. So again, the element of using paper lacks that real-time visibility, therefore not getting the information to the problem solvers in enough time.
Finally, for this information to be useful, it needs to be logged into some kind of database, as I mentioned earlier, like Excel or Airtable. This means someone has to take time out of their day to read it, understand it, and then log it into a system. What else could that person be doing with however long it takes? We bump into people who have someone whose exclusive job it is to round up the shop floor workers, go and get the paper at the end of the day, put it into an Excel spreadsheet when, really, this is simply not necessary with the kind of technology we have access to today.
So to really put into perspective this piece of paper's lifecycle, this is its role through the entire production process. It tracks data through manufacturing for that data to then be plugged into another system, more than likely an Excel spreadsheet. The purpose is so that we can then look back retrospectively at the success and productivity of former jobs.
But of course, if the information isn't put in correct and isn't understandable, it's all redundant. But again, reframing the problem, assuming this information is tracked perfectly through its lifecycle, this information is only useful when the process is finished. It's not going to do anything when we're in real-time, which is really where the opportunity is. So if we hit a bottleneck, problems with production, the only way for this information to reach our problem solvers ears is word of mouth. Or the most typical cause is problem solvers walking the shop floor more times a day than they should be.
So we've really been talking in reference to small job shops. We've been framing it in that perspective. And it sounds like a lot of them have the same problems, which is absolutely true. Large companies seem to have a grasp on people and processes. Can we not just mimic what they're doing? First of all, I guess, what are the larger companies using? The larger companies are using ERPs, in other words, Enterprise Resource Planning systems. And according to NetSuite's 2022 market research, 47% of ERP users are, in fact, manufacturing companies. So surely, this is a solution to our disconnection problem.
Well, let's take a look at some of the traditional modules that we may find in an ERP system. But we're going to frame them in the sense of our average job shop and put ourselves in the shoes of the owner who controls the purse strings. So let's imagine this is a meeting with an ERP provider. The first module they tried to sell us is production scheduling. This is something that we're really interested in because we've got nothing in place today. We've just went through the fact that we're using paper and spreadsheets. And really, we'd like to start tracking all of this digitally. So yeah, we'll take production scheduling.
HR, this doesn't feel like a necessary thing for a business of 14 people. We all know each other. Some people within the business, actually, are the same family as me. Some of them are friends. So HR definitely isn't something that I'm willing to pay money for today. Accounting is an area we've already went digital on. We have brought a small accounting module called QuickBooks. This automates our entire process. And there's really no need to reinvent the wheel when it's working. So we'll leave accounting out as well.
Quality management would be great. We currently don't have any way of tracking quality. We're also looking to get ISO certified and increase our quality in general because we do have some issues with that. So quality management is definitely going to be a module that we'd like, that we'd be interested in. SCM, or supply chain management, just isn't worth it for us. So if we think of SCM, we generally think about the automation of ordering. Considering there are so many variables in the job shop world, it's going to be almost impossible to get benefit out of supply chain management. So we'll leave that as well.
Inventory management sounds great. So we actually have hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars worth of raw materials kept on our shelves that we have no idea what size it is, what material it is, simply because we never tracked it through inventory. So I think this would be a really good time for us to start tracking that. Purchasing, again, as I said earlier, I have family members who work for us who actually do purchasing exclusively. So we'll leave that.
And then finally, manufacturing execution is an area that we struggle in because we do believe that we should be tracking production digitally to really squeeze more productivity and efficiency out of the current practices that we have today. So what we're looking at here is that out of the eight traditional ERP modules that we have, a small business at a stretch is going to be interested in four of them. Assuming they're paying by module, that might even be two or one.
So let's move forward and let's explore ERPs a little bit more. We can see there's obviously some value here. But let's look into it a little bit more. So technically, an ERP could be a silver bullet and a perfect fit. So the next question is, what's the catch? The first question that any small business owner with limited cash flow is going to ask is, what is this costing me? And according to ERP focus, an ERP project will cost on average for small businesses, zero to 49 employees, $8,500 per user. So right away, this price will make a small business owner's stomach turn.
The other elephant in the room is the time it takes to integrate such a system. Again, according to ERP research, a small to medium-sized company will roughly take three to nine months. Now, three months is an incredibly optimistic ERP implementation. You are much more likely to be looking at nine months, generally. But again, three to nine months is a pretty long time.
Pile that on top of a 50% first time failure rate and only a 67% overall success rate, the task of taking on an ERP through a small business looks pretty daunting. There are also anecdotal variables which we need to consider, such as, do we have someone in our 14 person business who has time to work with the provider?
Has anyone in the business ever managed a project of this scale before? Does anyone in the company know what success looks like? Probably not. The odds are stacked against us. But I don't think we should rule it out yet. Let's take a look at ourselves, look at our cash flow, our business in general, and see if it's something that we can realistically consider.
So let's look into what an actual average job shop in the US looks like. Maybe we're not giving these shops enough credit. First off, the average job shop in the USD has around 14 employees, meaning that $8,500 per person fee is going to roughly equate to around $120,000. Also, take this figure with a pinch of salt because ERP prices are very fluid. They're hard to put their finger on. But this is the statistics and the data that we found.
Our yearly revenue is $1.5 million, according to the amount of people we have on average and the average sales per employee for average shops. So again, $1.5 million with a 10% profit margin means that our profit on a yearly basis, give or take, is going to be around $150,000. So the introduction of an ERP is going to essentially be the entire profits of a full year. What this means is that we are effectively rolling the dice that an implementation for an ERP could potentially go very well for us. Or it could actually sink the entire business. But what's the solution if it's not an ERP and it's not paper?
So what are we seeing in the market? We're seeing retrofitted Frankenstein-built systems, which are generally going to be a combination of many different systems integrated together. In our example, a typical case study we're seeing in the market is going to be Fusion 360, which will be the design and manufacturing tool of choice, Prodsmart being the overarching production tracking MES, and a general small business accounting software, something like QuickBooks.
Absolutely less convenient, not as harmonious as an all-in-one system. But nonetheless, the extra inconvenience versus the cost saving is going to be a no brainer for every small business owner out there. So we've talked enough about the industry, the problems, and the antiquated solutions in place today. But the key topic here today is Prodsmart. So with all of that discussed, let me introduce the Autodesk solution to these problems.
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- Operating a production facility can be complicated, with a constant need to monitor everything from raw materials through to finished goods. To help address the challenges, production managers look to manufacturing execution systems, or MES, to track their production processes. But often, these can be expensive to set up, painful to integrate, and under-deliver on addressing their true needs. Autodesk Prodsmart is different.
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Prodsmart is a go anywhere, use anywhere, cloud-connected MES and light enterprise resource planning system, which capitalizes on the use of web browsers and mobile devices for operation. This minimizes the IT overhead needed to get you up and running sooner and gives you the flexibility to start managing your production data today and adapt to your business as it grows.
Focus on what's important, like monitoring your operations through production tracking dashboards and audit-ready quality compliance reports, fed by real-time information collected from the shop floor, making it easy to visualize your production efficiency all the way from orders to shipping. Manage your teams, machines, and materials to optimize your production capacity and increase manufacturing throughput with material and resource planning, helping to minimize waste and reduce the environmental impact of your business.
With scheduling for preventive or corrective machine maintenance to reduce production downtime. And integrate with upstream or downstream resource planning, customer relationships, and product life cycle management systems to keep your data synchronized and prevent duplication. So whether you need to improve your production workflow and execution, cope with change in quality management, or get visibility on throughput and machine maintenance, get your business future ready with Autodesk Prodsmart.
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DYLAN SMITH: So that hopefully sets the scene for people who either don't spend all day within these kinds of tools or haven't really spent much time in job shops and not really aware of these problems. With it being AU, it's important to take the problems within the industry and bring everyone in the room to the same place. Otherwise, we have some experts who know everything that I'm talking about and other people on a completely different page.
So moving on, I'm a big believer in being candid and transparent and not trying to make something come across as something that it's not. So one of the lessons here today was, where does Prodsmart not fit? And one of the simple answers here is that Prodsmart doesn't fit in continuous manufacturing facilities.
Now, continuous manufacturing, for those who aren't aware of what that is, is the manufacturing type of making products nonstop on some sort of production line without interruptions or batching of any kind. Now, why doesn't this work for Prodsmart? When we execute a job in Prodsmart, which we'll find out soon because we are going to get into the product, we have to define a quantity in which we want to make. If we have a production line that's making things 24/7, 365, this doesn't make sense. There's going to be no useful information gathered from there.
On top of that, there's a specific niche in the market for this kind of software. And companies will develop solutions like this specifically for continuous manufacturing. Now if you still don't have an idea of what continuous manufacturing is, some of the industries we're typically referring to are, say, pharmaceutical, like medical manufacturing, medication manufacturing, sorry, papermaking, a lot of the food and drink manufacturers, oil refinement, and the majority of automotive assembly lines.
So apart from me coming from this type of background, what's interesting about the high mix, low-volume job shop world? So we went through the start. We now all have a good idea about some of the problems that we have in industry. We have a good idea about some of the typical solutions people are implementing, like paper, like ERPs. Why is high mix, low volume so interesting?
First of all, it's very important to define high mix and low volume. Now, this is information that I spoke to with many different colleagues of mine to ensure that I didn't have a distorted view of the definitions. When we think of high mix, we're referring to companies, generally, who don't have a product line. They don't sell items which are stocked on shelves. Everything they make is generally going to be unique.
This, however, doesn't mean that nothing is repeat. These shops may still and often do, in my experience, redo a project for a customer they've done in the past. If a company does a good job and they did it for a reasonable price and did it within time, of course, that company is going to come back and ask for the same part again.
When we think low volume, we're thinking about individual orders which generally don't exceed 100 units. This doesn't mean that it never exceeds 100 units. But they aren't doing thousands of parts all the time. It's generally going from onesie, twosies, all the way up to 100. It's also important to remember that these terms are somewhat objective. But that's how we should think about them today.
Let's bring back the original question. Why are job shops so interesting? It's because there are so many of them. This was a survey from 192 shops. Some of you may question the sample size. But this is generally the trend that I'm seeing from my personal experience with the amount of customers that I speak to. What we're seeing is around 58% of manufacturers are job shops, give or take a few percentage. The definition of a job shop, in this case, is going to be an independent shop that-- let's do this slide again. 3, 2, 1.
Let's bring back the original question. Why are job shops so interesting? It's because there are so many of them. This was a survey from 182 shops. Now, this may be a small sample size. But this is generally the trend that me and many of my colleagues are seeing in the industry. What we're seeing is around 58% of all machine shops are job shops, give or take a few percent. The definition of a job shop, in this case, is an independent shop that performs short runs.
The other two definitions we have are contracting cap if, now, contract shops are similar, but different in the volume they produce. The definition here is an independent shop that primarily does repeat and part numbers. Generally, these customers are the ones who will be directly supplying parts outsourced from OEM, so maybe tier one suppliers. And finally, a captive shop will be a job shop. Let's do this one more time. We'll get it right this time. 3, 2, 1.
Let's bring back the original question. Why are job shops so interesting? It's because there are so many of them. This was a survey from 182 shops, which may be slightly small sample size. But this is generally the trend that me and many of my colleagues are seeing in the industry. What we're seeing is around 58% of all machine shops in the US are job shops, give or take a few percentage for the small sample size.
The definition of a job shop, in this case, was an independent shop that performs short runs. A contract shop is similar, but different in the volume they produce. The definition here is an independent shop that primarily does repeating part numbers. Generally, these customers are the ones who will be directly supplying parts outsourced from OEMs.
And finally, a captive shop will be a shop that is prototyping, engineering, or fabricating within an in-house workshop. So an example of this could be a research facility within an OEM or even just a normal production facility within an OEM. And if we take this number, 18,826, which is information pulled directly from a report, this is the amount of machine shop service businesses that are in the US as of 2023. So if we assume conservatively that 50% of these are job shops, that's at least 9,000 job shops in the US.
The reoccurring theme which always comes up is the decision-making strategy from these manufacturers. They use their gut feeling to make the majority of decisions as opposed to using objective data. Again, this is why the opportunity for these companies is so exciting. This means they're right a lot of the time because they have, generally, so much experience in the industry. But they're also wrong a lot of the time. And also, a lot of the decisions they make fall into this weird middle ground, where they're not wrong, but they're definitely not making optimal decisions.
These decisions are made on crucial facets of the business from scheduling. Where do things fit in? Can we fit it in there? Again, using gut feeling to feel it out. Employee effectiveness. We think this guy is good. We think that girl is good. We think he's bad because we don't like him. But really, he's the best employee. All the way through to productivity. We think we made some money on that job. But I can't quantify it.
And again, what's my personal experience here? I couldn't find statistics that told me how many small to medium-sized manufacturers don't have MES or ERPs. So I decided to draw upon my own personal experience. I interact with well over 400 customers a year, talking to them about their designs, their manufacturing, and their shop floor issues. Most of the customers I speak to would fall into the definition of job shop, which we've just described a couple of slides ago, most of which do not have any kind of MES or ERP. And what's even scarier is how many have never even heard of these systems.
And the reason why this excites me so much is because I know how many businesses do not have this technology. The reason that's exciting to me is because these businesses don't know how much is being left on the table. Finding 10%, 15%, 20%, extra productivity or efficiency, more in these businesses, can be the difference between solvency and survival.
So without further ado, let's move into Prodsmart. Let's take a look at some of the explicit features within this tool that can help job shops. So here we are finally in the product. We always need to start off in Prodsmart by introducing the Home dashboard of Prodsmart. This is a screen where we get high-level executive information which, by the way, the majority of job shops don't have today.
Let's start at the top left-hand side of the screen. This is the feed. I like to refer to the feed as almost like the social media of the shop floor. As things happen on the shop floor, we see this information coming to us in real-time. And again, the reason why this is so interesting to job shops is because one of the big problems they have is transparency and understanding where jobs are. These owners have to walk the floor on a very frequent basis. And how much holiday do you think a small job shop owner takes? I'm sure you can probably guess.
On the right-hand side of the screen, there are some great high-level business metrics. Productivity is our metric for, how long did we expect something to take versus how long did it take? Again, everything we talk about has to be framed in reference to a job shop. Do you think a job shop has productivity percentages on every job they do? Of course they don't.
Availability. The way you want to think about this is if we had 10 machines and one of them was down for a day, our availability for that day would be 90%. And quality is the defect rate. If we make 100 parts and 12 of them are wrong, our defect rate is going to be 88%. Our defect rate is 88%, sorry, yeah.
So if we're business owners and we want to protect and grow our business, these numbers are great KPIs to drive towards objective metrics that we can push our business towards to protect and scale. Bottom left on the screen, we have ongoing jobs. So again, think about transparency. This is going to tell us what we have on the shop floor today.
Finished jobs on the right-hand side of the screen are going to tell us what's finished today. So that can inform different departments and different people, like shipping and logistics to go and ship our jobs. Then in the middle, we have any products that are finished today in green, products wasted in red. In the middle, we have people who are working and people who aren't. And then on the right, machines that are working and machines that aren't.
Now, I'm not just going to aimlessly walk you through the product and tell you clicks and picks. It's really not my style in general. So I'm going to say, I'm going to walk us through more of a story, let's say. So we have a scenario to talk about here. And really, we're going to put ourselves in the shoes of the job shop owner. One of our main customers phones us. And he wants 20 of a part pretty much as soon as possible. They're a big customer. So what we need to do whilst he's on the phone is figure out where the space is within our schedule. So let's see what this situation would play out like within Prodsmart.
So as we move from the Home dashboard into our Scheduling tab, firstly, we have a schedule, which is looking at it from a product perspective. We're going to switch that into an on a job perspective. Now, one thing I want everyone to notice is that we have these red indicators at the top of the screen, which tell us a specific capacity for a day. Now, we can see that over the next couple of weeks, we are far too booked out. We don't have any space to book any of the jobs in.
So what we have to do is push out our calendars, filter out a little bit, and see what we have in a few weeks. And what we can see is that towards the end of the schedule, we have some blue there. So we have some capacity. So we can tell our big customer on the phone that, yeah, we can probably squeeze you in from the sixth onwards no problem. Now, again, even just off the rip, that gives us immediate information that we can communicate with our customer. So assuming our customer has agreed, which they have, on the 6 of October, we're going to start the job for them. And now it's time to move through Prodsmart and go through the traditional workflow.
So before we continue with that, we need to talk about something called products because products within Prodsmart are a fundamental way and a fundamental understanding to how the product works. Products can be something defined as consumables, like a dowel, a screw, a pin. They can be raw materials, such as bar stock, or finished goods, such as a CNC machine component, a subassembly, or a full assembly. Think of them as anything that you would want to track as inventory.
Now, if we go into a consumable, like a dowel, one of the first really cool things that a lot of job shops struggle with is inventory management. Now, I've worked in shops where I need dowels, washers, screws, pins and we never seem to have any. It's a secondary consideration for owners. Now, we have things like minimum inventory on the middle right-hand side of the screen within Prodsmart, which tell us when we get to a certain level of inventory, I want you to email relevant parties to tell them to start ordering this stuff. So it's a great inventory management tool.
If we move into a process good, like a CNC machine part, we can see information here, such as process flow, operational flow. We can see the raw stock that needs to be consumed. And then on top of that, we can see here any type of files that are going to be associated. So going back to some of our problems that we faced earlier, such as file management and inventory management levels, even just these simple cases within here can be real solutions to those problems.
And then finally, looking at something that has more of a bill of materials, what we can see here is that Prodsmart is saying, if you want to make one of these, you have to consume all of this. So again, it's just better documentation and everything's consolidated. So immediately solving many of those traditional job shop problems that we are seeing.
So let's go back to our scenario. Our customer phones us, gave us the job. We managed to find some time in the schedule, which is great. Next, we need to get the ball rolling within Prodsmart to set everything straight. We have one million other things to do as a small business owner. So we want to get to the admin within Prodsmart as soon as possible so we can get on with other stuff.
So what we're doing is preliminarily creating the job to put a hold on the schedule so we don't book any other work in this spot. What we can see happening here is us creating the product through the job board, which isn't the conventional way of doing it. But it's the fastest. And job shops love speed. Once we've created our product, I now want to associate a template with that product. I've already built them out. So it's a case of just picking. And what we can see here is I have three different templates. Three templates was one machine operation, two machine operations, and three. So that essentially covers all bases. And I can select them without doing unnecessary admin.
We then gave the job a unique name. We give the job a start date. We want to give the job a conservative end date as well because what we want to do here, again, this is preliminary work without all the details. We're essentially blocking time off within the schedule to ensure that if another customer phones us, we don't forget and book over that time because that's not going to be good for us.
So again, we put a name for the product. We gave the job a code. We did a start date. We did a conservative end date. We're now going to move from the due date. And we're going to tell Prodsmart how many of these we want to make. Our fictitious customer wants 20 of them. And then finally, because I'm a job shop and I have many different skilled people on the floor, I'm going to be very specific about who does what where.
So we can be very prescriptive within Prodsmart because, of course, on our shop floor, we're going to have people who are laborers, who are cleaners, who are machinists, who are benchends. Each of those has a different skill. So each of those is suited towards different operations. And what we're seeing here on the screen is we are assigning specific people to specific operations because, again, we don't want the laborer or the cleaner doing the machining. And we don't want the machinist doing the cleaning. So we're very prescriptive. And Prodsmart allows us to do that.
So it's important to note that this job is inactive, meaning it's not live for the shop floor to see yet. I wanted to create the job to get it on the schedule. Then I can input the necessary details later on, like quality control checks, like 2D drawings. So let's play out the situation a little bit more. I'm a machine shop owner. I'm putting fires out all day. I've done the bare minimum admin earlier on whilst on the phone to the customer. But now I need to come in and start inputting the more refined details in.
So it's not surprising that as the owner, I also do the quoting. The way we track that information within Prodsmart, as we can see happening right now, is by associating specific times to specific operations. That's how we do it. Maybe we're ambitious with our quoting. Maybe we're underperforming the shop floor. Either way, having more objective to understand why we miss from a quoting perspective is going to be good. That's why we track the operational numbers.
Now we go back into the product. And what we're saying here is that, what materials do we need to consume in order to make this? So again, are we using something which comes from the shelf that we already have this within stock? If so, let's associate that. If not, we need to order some material, input that as a product, and then associate that. Nonetheless, to keep our inventory management system true and up-to-date, we need to associate some sort of consumption within the product.
Next, we're going back into the product to add some details we didn't receive straight away from our customer. Firstly, we have an accumulation of all the operations telling us how long it objectively takes us to make one of these, which is 2,400 seconds. On top of that, we may want to add some notes associated to the job that will, let's say, refer to the drawing.
We also want to add, of course, 2D drawings to make everything easily more accessible when we start the job. One enormous problem that we see within job shops is they have poor management of documentation. Using a tool like Prodsmart allows for this documentation to be consolidated. So when these businesses get audited or when a customer wants a job doing again in the future, all the appropriate information is very easy to find.
A successful job shop only has to do a few things right. I'm definitely not saying that these things are easy. But it's a relatively small list. We have to quote jobs accurately. We have to complete things on time. And we have to make parts that are high quality. There are a couple of small things that we can introduce within Prodsmart that have made the world of difference for many customers of ours.
We can introduce things like work instructions. And what we're seeing here is us making the work instructions. Now, I don't want to talk you through each click and step. But I'm going to talk you through the process. The benefit here is, number one, we're lowering the entry barrier for skilled work, like CNC machining. Maybe we have younger, less experienced, or just not as good workers. This is really going to democratize these skills by introducing explicit work instructions on the iPad or tablet of the user.
The other benefit is the ability to have important documentation pop up on people's tablets when they start a job instead of the typical job shop way, which is being handed a wad of paper, most of it uninteresting and unnecessary. This is one facet of Prodsmart that allows us to go paperless. And the other thing that we see now is a tool that's going to make us more repeatable and reproducible. And this is introducing mid-process checks called checklists and parameters.
If we have critical dimensions, we want people checking these, as a result, being documented and the individual who did the measurement and documentation to be accountable for that particular component. This makes all of our processes traceable. So if anything ever goes wrong, we can always track it back through production records to see exactly who was doing that work. Again, this is quality checklist. We introduce them. The functionality within the product facilitates these kinds of mid-process checks.
And again, there are a couple of things we're doing here. When do we want this to show? So show on rework, show on production. We're going to see in just a couple of slides that when we check in via the operator tablet, what's happening is that these checklists are being prompted to the user as they complete operations. And the work instructions are going to be popping up as they check in. So these are just stops along the way to help us out. And it's important to note that these aren't mandatory within Prodsmart. But we do see a lot of our customers exploiting them.
So once we go back into the product and we've inputted the relevant level of detail on the product level, it's time to go back into the job and refine the timeline because, if we remember, earlier on, we put an arbitrary time in the schedule as a placeholder. Now, some people may be confused between a product and a job. A product is going to be the physical individual component that we're defining. So let's say the characteristics, the operational flow, the material that it needs to consume.
And the job is going to be the execution of that product. So how many do we want to make? When do we want to start? Who's going to be working on it, et cetera. Hopefully, that makes sense. And again, to kick this off, if you remember, we tweaked the time of each operation earlier on. So we went into each operation that we had to do and gave it a more specific time.
Now, one thing that we're doing here is automating the end date. And this is a tool within Prodsmart that's saying, well, I know how many you want to make. I know how long it takes to make these. I know what our schedule looks like. What's the earliest this can be done? And the inverse of that is, I want this job to be finished at this date. What's the latest we can possibly start it? So when we put a lot of information within Prodsmart, we start to get the benefit of automation and these kinds of tools.
Now we're going to look at the worker menu. This is what everyone on the shop floor is going to be looking at. We've created and refined the product and job already. We can now switch gears slightly and see how our shop floor machine is going to interact with the product. So as I mentioned earlier, as our worker signs into Prodsmart, we can see the 2D drawing that's popping up on the screen here. No need for paper. The 2D drawing is directly associated with the product. So again, that's going to be automatically popping up whenever we do the job.
Now, when the job has been done, what we can see is there's a check that we introduced earlier. If I pause that right back here, the question at the top is, using the calibrated micrometer, measure the thickness three times and document the average value. Now, this question is a question that we-- I made personally. And this was in reference to a critical dimension that popped up on the drawing.
Now, the benefit here is that whatever value gets put into here is going to be directly stored within the production records of this product. So anything that goes wrong, we can very easily go back, look within the production records, and see explicitly who did this. Let's keep the video playing. And again, we put the value in. That value is stored next to the production records.
And that's the interaction that our worker has with the tablet. They sign in. They get the work instructions. That can be 2D drawing. That can be explicit steps. They do the work. They come back in to Prodsmart, tell Prodsmart how many of whatever that was making, how many they made. And then, we can have quality control questions like, tell us the specific dimension of this important dimension here. Or it can be binary. It can be yes or no. It can be a signature. It can be a photograph. The bottom line is accountability is a real issue within job shops. And this does introduce a high level of accountability.
So what makes Prodsmart so good in another sense is that now the information is all stored within the product. If our customer ever comes back to me and wants the same job again, it's very, very easy for me to just execute on the same job again. I have the operations. I have the time it takes. I have the documentation, like drawings, and work instructions, checklists, all associated to the product. All I need to do is just execute the job.
So we can even do things like look at the cost of the raw material from last time. And what we can do is, say, how much did the raw material cost last time? Who did we get it from? We can phone that person up again. Again, it's just all about consolidation and cleanliness of documentation, which these shops don't have today.
Again, the reason why this is important is because normal job shops without a system would have to physically flick through a filing cabinet or go on to the computer and go through their own self-made way of doing this. It's not going to be as easy, though, is the bottom line. And again, re-executing a job we've done before, which is very typical in job shops, within Prodsmart is super easy.
Now, one thing that I always like to talk about is reports and analytics within these products that really help define and move business decisions. So we can look at things like, who are our top performing employees? I've mentioned earlier on that job shops are generally going to use gut-feeling decision making strategies to guess who the top employees to see what the top paying jobs are that we take on. All of that information is directly going to be stored within Prodsmart. We can also look at things like downtime as well.
So if I play that, what we can see is the different graphs that we can create. And by the way, there's no entry here from the admin. This is all information that's flowing in from the shop floor. And on top of the analytics and the graphs, we can also produce reports. So if I'm doing a job again for a customer, I can produce a report that's going to tell me exactly how long it took me to do the job last time.
We can see the amount of time we expected us to take versus how long it took, who worked on it. So you imagine having that kind of historical information second time around when it comes to doing a job. We have so much information. That requoted of the repeat work is going to be so much more thorough than it was the first time. So historical data is just constantly going to be teaching us.
So quality analytics is the next part of Prodsmart which is worth talking about, which is automatically tracked. So as our workers clock out of jobs, if something goes wrong, they say, this went wrong because of this reason and this is how many got scrapped. Now, what that does with Prodsmart, we have this database that's collected in the back that's collecting our defect rate.
Now, we have 7.6% defect rate, which means that if I do 100 jobs, out of those 100, statistically, 7.6% of them is going to have something wrong with them. Now, that's great as a number. If I'm a business owner, say, let's get our defect rate from 7.6% down to 5% next year. That's going to make us an extra $5,000.
Where it gets very interesting is that underneath that 7.6% defect rate, we have buckets for why things went wrong. We have machine inaccuracy, broken cutters, mismeasured tools, wrong datums. And we can see percentages next to each one of those. So if we play the video, what we're going to see is that, again, we've got all of these defects. So we can see nearly 1/2 of everything that goes wrong is due to machine inaccuracy, which may prompt us to say, let's get the OEMs in, get [INAUDIBLE], get [INAUDIBLE], to come and recalibrate the machine. But the benefit here having all this information is that I can further filter the information.
So let's start to look at individual workers. And what we can see here is that worker number one has a defect rate nearly three times the average of the shop. They have a 19.1% defect rate in comparison to the average, which is seven. And again, we're still in the shoes of the owner of the shop here. What we're doing is getting objective information that can say, maybe worker number one needs a little bit of training. Or maybe they have a bad attitude. Who knows what it is? Nonetheless, we need to take some sort of action to fix this. Let's look at another worker, worker number two.
Well, we can see that worker number two has a higher defect rate than the shop average. But it's still lower than worker number one. So here, maybe we put a worker who has a lower defect rate with both of these to shadow them so they can tell us what's going wrong. And we can even see the breakdown of, what is the core issue here? So we can see this worker, his main issue is machine inaccuracy. Maybe he's using a different machine to working, number one.
All of this information is constantly telling us a story. Again, we can get as granular as we like. We can pile these on top of each other. We can even start to look at individual machines. And we can say, if this machine has a 21% defect rate, I think a pretty standard course of action here for us is going to be something like doing a repair, doing a service, doing a calibration.
And that's really everything we've got through, the product itself. We have got some bits to finish off here. But that's Prodsmart from a shop floor owner's perspective. It's not necessarily step-by-step how to use the product because there's so much of that. It's how are all of these things so relevant and framed towards a job shop, and some of the sneaky little tips and tricks in there that you may not have known about, like creating a product in the job field or using templates, then going in to change the operations.
Moving forward, though, we've spoken a couple of times about how the retrofitted Frankenstein approach of merging multiple products together, like Fusion 360 and Prodsmart, what does that look like? So I've alluded to it. But the tool within the Autodesk suite that plays best with Prodsmart is going to be Fusion 360.
If you don't know what Fusion 360 is, it's a design and manufacturing tool, Autodesk's flagship design manufacturing tool, that is CAD/CAM, CAE, PCB boards, FAE, generative design rendering, many different functionalities. But what specifically is involved between the two products in regards to integration? But firstly, why is this important to job shops?
We've said many times, one of a job shop's top priorities is speed. Many of the things that we've done within Prodsmart is to try and do things quicker than maybe a company that has SKUs would do things in Prodsmart. So speed is a number one priority. These kinds of facilities also do not want to be inundated with admin work. This probably isn't the thing that they're best at.
They are best at putting metal or some kind of material on machines and turning it into a product. The less admin they have to do, the better. Direct information flow equals less chances of mistakes. So there's not exporting and re-importing back in. And then finally, a platform-like experience over siloed products is always going to be a better user experience.
But instead of me telling you about the integration between Prodsmart and Fusion 360, why don't we take a look at it? So here we have a bike frame within Fusion team. And what we're going to see here is that the typical creation of a job that we've just been through earlier on by putting in the code, putting in the start date and end date, instead of creating the product directly, we're going to import that product from Fusion 360. So the email address is going to recognize the Fusion 360 email address. And it's going to link the two accounts together so we can essentially see our Fusion 360 data panel.
Now, as we pick the templates, which we did earlier on for ours, and pick the people who are going to be working on the job, what we're going to see as we move forward is the different 3D viewer within the products. So first of all, the bill of materials from Fusion comes over. So if we have a full assembly and we integrate that, that information is going to be brought over there. On top of that, we can physically orientate the 3D model within Prodsmart and get things like the 2D drawing over. So any useful information you have within Fusion 360, like the bill of materials, like the 3D model, like the 2D drawing, that information can directly flow over.
Now, what does this look like for our workers? Now, when our workers are on the tablet, one thing that we want is to give them as much information as possible. Now firstly, again, we have the 3D viewer and the bill of materials. So our workers can be on the shop floor. They can be taking measurements on specific parts on their tablet, not needing Fusion 360 licenses, but directly getting all of that information from their Prodsmart app within their tablet.
So again, if we think about that in comparison to how job shops do things today, workers could have tablets and have 3D viewers with work instructions, with 2D drawings, with bills of material. That's a huge insight into the transparency. Much more transparency than they have today, really getting rid of some of those key issues, which are siloed areas, documentation being lost. Everything's going to stay live and digital.
With that, I do want to summarize, saying that I strongly believe there's a huge opportunity to get enterprise level insights without enterprise level tools by leveraging pre-baked and custom integrations with singular tools like Fusion 360, Prodsmart, and QuickBooks. The job shop world and manufacturing as a whole has a very exciting future. Thank you for listening.