Shane's Blog - April/May 2016
Shane Allen
Head of SYNCHRO ERP North American Operations
Howdy from Texas USA where we are slowly but surely entering the summer season with extremely hot temperatures and unfortunately many areas of Texas are drowning with too much rain. Funny thing weather is, Texas a year or so ago was in the midst of a severe drought and now, we have more water than we know what to do with. I guess turnabout is fair play and the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Speaking of change, if you are a metalcaster kicking the tires on a new software system for managing the facility, then you are obviously embarking upon “change”. The funny thing about change with software is that some metalcasters want to swap out the software for something new, but do not want to consider changing and improving the underling processes, procedures, and flow. There is always room for improvement through change, especially if it is going to improve the bottom line.
Change just to change is really not a viable solution. There needs to be a reason for change and in my book, improving financials is always a motivation for change. When I was at the foundry, the general manager decided to change things up for some reason and I often suspect that it was the book of the month club of “If it isn’t broken, break it”. One Monday morning, the metallurgist was reassigned to be the sales manager and the sales manager would become the metallurgist. Unfortunately the new metallurgist had not practiced the craft of melting metal to specifications in a great number of years and the cost of melting metal skyrocketed as did scrap. The new sales manager had no experience in sales and of course sales plummeted. The next general manager reversed course and restored things as to how they should have been.
When considering a new software platform from a litany of choices, metalcasters have several options to consider
(1). In-house development and programming
(2) generic off-the-shelf solutions
(3) specialized solutions.
Of course, I’m going to push you towards a specialized solution as at the end of the day, it is the only decision that makes any sense. The lifecycle of in-house development and programming is fraught with challenges of getting the solution in place in a timely manner as well as maintaining the solution for many years into the future. Generic solutions to me are like using a spreadsheet program for word processing, it gets the job done, but at the end of the day it is really not a good solution.
I maintain that a specialized solution is the only solution.
finally ship weights. Additionally, the ability to remelt scrap and recover the tailings and floor sweeps for remelt needs to be included in the solution. There are so many nuances within the metalcasting industry that are just plain fundamentals that any other solution than a specific solution is really not a viable solution.
At the end of the day, or at least the end of this blog, it’s all about change, why you are changing, and why you need a specialized solution. A little ditty to leave you with.
Little girl walks into the kitchen and notices momma measuring a ham with a ruler and slicing off portions on each side to make the ham exactly ten inches in length. The little girl asks “why are you doing that?” and the momma replies, because my mother taught me to prepare ham for cooking this way. The little girl goes and asks grandma about cutting the ham and the grandma replies “well, at the time I only had a baking dish that would hold a ten inch ham, so I needed to trim it! The moral of this is that when contemplating changing of software, nothing should be sacred. A metalcaster should examine all of the baking dishes to insure they can hold the ham!
Well, until next time, see you on down the road in blazing hot Texas. Tis till then… As always, be safe!
Shane Allen
Head of SYNCHRO ERP North American Operations
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