Monarch "empowers our end users to work independently with the ERP data they need within Excel," and "provides the daily insight to our capacity data that we need to effectively manage our business, without the cost and headaches of complex BI solutions."

 

Manufacturing Business Intelligence Made Easy

Titan Tool, a member of WAGNER-Group, is a leading manufacturer of paint spray equipment, based in New Jersey. The company has achieved plentiful business insight into its manufacturing data with Monarch, while avoiding a needlessly gigantic investment of time and money in traditional business intelligence (BI) solutions.

"I have used Monarch for years and can't imagine working without it," says Eric Estes, Director IS for Titan Tool. "Our mainframe ERP system is a solid enterprise solution for us, with a huge library of existing reports. However, our system is weak at providing subsets of data to help us make decisions to ensure our lean manufacturing planning is successful."

"We looked at several reporting and BI solutions which would have run either on our mainframe or on a separate server. In all cases, we found these solutions to be very expensive, and all appeared cumbersome to maintain and to provide user support."

"We really wanted to empower our end users to work independently with the ERP data they needed within Excel. Monarch has fulfilled this requirement for us very effectively and reliably, at a small fraction of the cost and time we would have invested in a traditional BI solution."

Monarch transforms Titan Tool's ERP reports into live, actionable data, complete with additional calculations; additional data located within other sources; summary data views with subtotals and grand totals, and more, ready for export to Excel, Access and many other formats, with no programming and no need for assistance from the IT department.

"We haven't yet encountered any ERP data that we can't get into the desired format in Excel, using Monarch with our existing ERP reports," says Eric. "Monarch makes working with our ERP data very easy."

The ease in which Monarch provides customized Excel-based ERP data enables Titan Tool to effectively manage its lean manufacturing processes. "Like every manufacturer, the key challenge we face every day is whether we have enough capacity to produce what we need, when we need to produce it," says Eric. "There are a number of variables we must track and manage. We run certain assembly lines on certain days; other lines may run on different days. We have the same labor pool working these different lines."

"Our mainframe ERP capacity module works well, but provides capacity data only on a weekly basis," says Eric. "We need to translate our weekly capacity into daily activity; in other words, what work will we do each day to achieve our capacity for the entire week. Monarch answers this important question for us, quickly and easily."

"Monarch mines data from our existing work center capacity reports into a data table. We then add certain calculated fields to the data using Monarch to derive the number of days each assembly line is operational for the week and calculate the daily capacity. This data is then exported to Excel data using the Monarch summary view, showing the current planned capacity for each assembly line. We use the color-conditional formatting in Monarch to quickly flag any particular lines which will be at over-capacity. This information enables our planning managers to proactively reschedule certain jobs, or bring in temporary workers, to resolve the overcapacity identified by Monarch."

Monarch mines data from Titan Tool's ERP reports and summarizes the data with color codings to identify areas of expected future overcapacity, all without programming and without a huge investment in BI solutions.

"Monarch provides the daily insight to our capacity data that we need to effectively manage our business, without the cost and headaches of much more complex BI solutions."

Monarch also resolves certain reporting limitations within its ERP system. "We may have hundreds of common parts which are used in many different assemblies," says Eric. "Unfortunately, it is difficult to determine whether we will run out of a certain common part before all scheduled assembly builds are completed. Monarch solves this informational problem for us, again without programming or building a brand new BI system."

"We run a 'repetitive shortage' report, containing all of our detailed build schedules for one month. It is a huge report – it would be a waste of time and paper to print it – but the data we need is buried in there. We bring that report into Monarch and mine the needed data into a Monarch table. We then slice, dice, filter and sort the data several ways for several groups of managers and workers."

"First, each buyer-planner receives an Excel spreadsheet showing the data for the parts they are responsible for. If the data from Monarch indicates future shortages, the buyer-planner can proactively source additional parts quickly to avoid the shortages from happening."

"Manufacturing line supervisors receive similar future shortage data, by part, for each assembly line they are responsible for. These views of the data from Monarch enables the supervisors work with buyer-planners to make sure those potential shortages are being addressed. Monarch enables a very effective system of cross-checking between buyer-planners and line supervisors to ensure possible future shortages are resolved in a timely manner."

"Also, our materials director must know all possible short-term shortages for the next week only. Monarch provides this information to enable his direct involvement to avoid any surprises which would otherwise halt an assembly line."

"Finally, Monarch enables us to identify which incoming parts are most urgently needed to avoid a shortage," Eric adds. "Armed with that information, our quality control team can inspect those part ship­ments first and get them into production as quickly as possible."

"Monarch transforms our report data into the different levels and layers of detail that the different groups of managers and workers need, without programming."

Monarch also enables the combination of data mined from multiple reports into a single data view. "There is a lot of interdependence between the data within one report and another," says Eric. "We use Monarch Projects frequently to help bring data from multiple reports from multiple ERP modules into a single Excel workbook. For example, our buyer-planners can compare the potential shortage data with data mined from our open purchase order reports, identifying additional parts are already on order. The buyer-planner can then proactively contact the vendor to confirm those critical parts will be delivered on time."

"Any of the very expensive and complex BI solutions we evaluated would have promised to provide the same answers to all of these time-sensitive manufacturing issues that we get from Monarch," says Eric. "But only Monarch can provide these answers without programming and without incurring needless cost and hassles. Monarch has reduced the complexity of effectively managing our business."

"Any truly effective BI solution should be able to easily tell you where you need to focus your efforts for maximum effectiveness and maximum success," concludes Eric. "That effective BI solution for Titan Tool is Monarch."

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