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Component Manufacturing dverti$er
Adverti$er
Don’t Forget! You Saw it in the
April 2017 #10213 Page #26
Todd Drummond Consulting, LLC.
Design, Sales and Admin Labor Shortages? – Give Them More Time by Automating Your Communications! Website: www.todd-drummond.com Phone (USA): 603-763-8857 E–mail: todd@todd-drummond.com Copyright © 2017
The call for more designers, salespeople and just about every other admin personnel is getting louder by the day. There are not enough hours in the week to meet sales demands. What if you could provide your team with tools that would give them more time? This way, you could save money by having fewer employees do more. While you’re at it, why not improve accountability with proper measurement of productivity, create fewer errors, and free up time for your sales team to make more sales calls? You can start by doing what other companies have been doing for years.
Case Study: Builders FirstSource, Inc.
Todd Berry, site manager BFS Jacksonville (2009)
“Never underestimate the power of being first.” That is the corporate slogan for Builders FirstSource, the premier national supplier of structural building products to new home builders. Builders FirstSource, Inc. (BFS) is a national supplier of engineered wood products and installable specialty items for the commercial homebuilding industry. Their use of AppWright JobCenter has been a significant driver of cost reduction and service level improvement in their roof truss and wall panel design and manufacturing areas. BFS also uses AppWright JobCenter to coordinate the purchasing, shipment, and installation of specialty items like windows, doors, fireplaces and other items that BFS supplies to commercial homebuilders. Top benefits of this implementation: - Significant design cycle time reductions - Same staff can handle twice the workload (or reduced staff can handle the same workload) - Costly design errors are dramatically reduced - Employee accountability and productivity measurement is improved - Customer satisfaction and retention is improved - Average profit margin per job is increased - Lost invoices and missed billings are eliminated through workflow tracking Full Narrative: The Jacksonville, FL division of BFS is one of the largest roof truss engineering and wall panel plants in the Southeast. A simplified view of the workflow for engineering and constructing a set of roof trusses for a home is as follows: 1. The builder submits a set of plans to the BFS design department. These plans are used by truss designers to create a detailed set of roof truss designs that will later be used by the production department in physically cutting the lumber and assembling the complete package of roof trusses to be used for a house. 2. Before actual production of the roof trusses can commence, the original house plans and the newly-completed truss designs are sent to the county permitting agency for design review and approval. 3. Once the approval is received, the production department takes the design, cuts the necessary lumber and assembles the roof trusses for delivery to the home site. 4. After delivery, the accounting department bills the customer (homebuilder) for the delivered truss package. 5. If any repairs or adjustments to the finished trusses are required in the field, BFS has crews who must quickly respond to the customer (homebuilder) and address any quality issues or design errors that are found. At each point in the basic workflow, valuable time was lost in keeping track of which designer had what jobs (which were originally in paper folders routed to various design desks), finding out what stage the county permitting process was at and communicating with the customer to clarify design requirements. In addition, if communication with the customer were not thoroughly documented, BFS would become responsible for costly after-production design changes, which would often eliminate any profit margin in the original order. Because individual designers were constantly shuffling physical stacks of job folders from station to station, it was more difficult to accurately manage personal workload and PHONE: 800-289-5627
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