Compete, Compete, and Compete Again. Automation Requires Customization.

A common theme I hear from the dozens of customers I speak to each week is the need to automate their processes with Global Shop Solutions. Nearly every need, want, and desire from a manufacturing owner or key employee ends with, “Dusty, how can we automate this? How can Global Shop Solutions help?” It doesn’t matter if they are making automotive stampings, chicken coops, or large oil derricks, our manufacturing customers want to automate their business as much as possible to lean out their operations, get accurate costing, get accurate inventory, have real time labor and material data from the shop floor, and ultimately become more successful, profitable, and a case study of Global Shop Solutions.

No two manufacturing businesses are the same and automation requires customization. This demand (and I don’t use the word lightly) from our customers for automation could mean reducing fields that are seen on a screen to help an employee be more effective; it could mean creating custom reports for better decision making, creating a custom email or text for a specific event, or something we have never heard of (yet).

Two popular customizations that are used by the vast majority of our customers out of the nearly 1,500 available in our Application & Resource Center (ARC Store) are the following:

1. Our CAD interfaces for SolidWorks®, Autodesk Inventor® and Solid Edge™. This allows our customers to drastically simplify data entry. Our standard interface not only builds the Bill of Material (BOM) in Global Shop Solutions ERP software, but also rapidly compares what is stored in your engineering system vs. your ERP system saving you time, money, and insuring accuracy.
2. On the shop floor, more and more of our customers want to go as paperless as possible. A new application available in our ARC application store forces the work instructions to pop-up as soon as an employee logs into a step. Instead of the employee relying on a piece of paper, he or she is now forced to respond to the screen, which insures that the right steps are taken in the right order and process is followed. This results in increasing the chances that a quality part is manufactured on-time, the first time, and lowers defect rates.

Global Shop Solutions is  one of the few ERP software systems that offers a software development toolkit (GAB SDK) that allows a customer to customize the software to their needs, leverage our Custom Development Department to code on the customers behalf, or leverage our ARC application store that has nearly 1,500 applications for free download by our customers.  I invite you to review some of the most popular and newest customizations available to our customers in our ARC store today. .

In 2016, Global Shop Solutions commits to helping all customers perfect the 10 ways we simplify your manufacturing, which all have underlying ties to automation of their business and customization of their software.

This blog is written by Dusty Alexander, President & CEO of Global Shop Solutions, because no matter how good you get (at physical fitness, running a manufacturing business or being an ERP user) you can always work harder, get better, and be humble.