Don"t let service go down the drain

I don"t know much, but I do know this: If metal fabricators had my plumber"s customer service record, they wouldn"t be in business for long.

Forgive my venting, but I"m sure many can relate. We had an oh-so-delightful problem with our plumbing1946 vintage. The trouble really began when we bought the house. We had what I like to call Old Home Delusional Disorder. (I"m stealing the term from humoristand my hero, in a wayDave Barry.) The house was, and is, absolutely charming: crown moldings, original kitchen fixtures, and, as it turned out, very original clay drain pipes that, as of January, had evolved into half dirt, half tree roots, and no substantial clay to speak of.

To make a long story short, we signed the plumbing contract, which specified a date when they would start and finish. Of course, I failed to read the small print: These times are estimates and may change due to circumstances out of our control.

You can guess what happened.
The plumbers showed up three days late, and the job took two days longer than they estimated. Looking back, I could deal with that. Things happen. Our situation wasn"t a total emergency (water still flowedjust not well), and the job wasn"t being charged as such. As it turned out, the plumber had a lot of emergencies pop up at once right at the time he had scheduled our job. Emergencies are his bread and butter, and I"m sure he made a hefty profit on all of them.

But that still doesn"t explain why he didn"t return my repeated phone calls for two days, or why he didn"t keep me posted on the project status once he finally made it here. I came home the day he was to be finished, and all I saw was a big hole, a broken pipeand no plumber. Again, things happen. As I found out later, things didn"t go smoothly. Fine. But how hard would it have been to take 10 seconds to give my cell phone a call, or at least send me a quick e-mail?

Such bad communication remains stereotypical of contractors for a reason, and I suppose plumbers usually deal with people who have inflexible demands; when you need one, you need one now. But for successful manufacturers, such poor service doesn"tor at least shouldn"tpass muster.

David Loomans knows this. The SAP project manager heads Greenheck Fan Corporation"s information technology effort that has made the manufacturer - which makes fans, kitchen hoods, dampers, and other products - stand out even during this commercial construction market. A dozen years ago the Schofield, Wis., company took several days to manufacture customer-specific fans and other commercial HVAC products. Today, thanks to automated systems involving lasers, punches, and plasma cutting, the 2,000-employee organization can make customized products in just a few hours.

What has made the whole operation really click is the combination of systems and a concept known as Field-to-Factory. F2F starts with Computer Aided Product Selection, or CAPS. This system allows customers to select and size equipment, select desired options and place a secure order online. The order carries with it all of the customer requirements including performance requirements and dimensional information for products like kitchen hoods that can be just about any length and width. Once the order hits the SAP system, SAP"s variant configurator takes over and calculates all of the critical purchase parts and manufacturing data needed to build the product exactly to the customer"s requirements.

From there, SAP, together with some in-house software platforms, moves the order to a system that automatically designs the product in CAD and communicates with other systems regarding the Bill of Materials and its route through the fabrication process.

More than that, the software communicates directly down to the PLC and other machine-level systems; for instance, upper-level software allows CAD data to flow seamlessly to the laser"s nesting software. Unless the order involves something special, there"s no significant human intervention from the time the customer places the order to when parts are fabricated on the floor.

Why make such an investment? As Loomans explained, many times those in the building industry do not know exact dimensions for a product, like a fire damper, until the actual ductwork is in place. Do the quick build fire dampers that Greenheck produces cost more than others that require long lead-times? Sure they do. But they cost less than ordering a cheaper product that ultimately does not fit. In Greenheck"s industry, speed matters, and therein lies the company"s unique selling point: Those start and finish dates aren"t rough estimates, and customers know where things stand at all times.