How one metal fabricator digitized and simplified job planning

Capacity planning remains one of the most complicated conundrums in custom fabrication, or any “job shop-like” custom manufacturing environment, where one job is completely different from the next. Machines have a finite capacity that can be planned for, but what about people?

onsider a large job that arrives in the welding department at a certain time. A scheduling system may push the due date out by default. With current resources, welders simply can’t finish the job in time. But in a cross-trained environment, could more welders be found elsewhere in the operation? Perhaps, but a fabricator needs to know what those cross-trained people are doing, if those people are trained and qualified to do the job, and how pulling them from elsewhere would affect other jobs. Managing a weeks- or monthslong fabrication project (as is typical with industrial fabricators) is a lot different than scheduling shift work on the production floor.

Resource planning becomes even more challenging for fabricators who not only cross train but also delve into other businesses outside custom fabrication. Andy J. Egan Co. in Grand Rapids, Mich., is a prime example.

Celebrating its centennial this year, Andy J. Egan Co. combines custom fabrication, including a lot of code-level work that requires various welding certifications and other qualifications, with mechanical contracting. Workers spend much of their days on job sites, welding, plumbing, and the like. Although this changes from week to week and month to month, roughly 40 percent of the shop’s fabrications are sent to external customers while the remaining 60 percent serve the company’s mechanical contracting work.

Who’s doing what, and when? And if we need more welders or fitters for a job, who’s qualified and available? Managers have spent a lot of time on the phone and in meetings trying to answer these and other questions—until recently, that is. Today managers log on to a website or look on their phone to see who’s doing what and where. It’s like a virtual whiteboard, constantly evolving, tailored to make the sometimes-chaotic world of the skilled trades not quite so chaotic.

Meeting at the Whiteboard

Amy Jones, vice president, has painful memories of those weekly planning meetings, sitting around a conference table and looking up at a whiteboard, where managers would write, erase, write again, then erase and write again until they hammered out a schedule they thought would work for the current mix of projects.

“Then when we left the meeting, and usually by a half-hour later, it would all go up in smoke,” Jones said, thanks to ever-changing project timelines—something any fabricator that sells to the construction business knows all too well. “Sometimes a customer postponed a phase of construction because, say, a certain piece of equipment wasn’t available on-site, or other tradespeople weren’t available at a certain time. It’s just the nature of the business. So we have to get people back together in a meeting, or you send out emails or make phone calls.”

During the weekly whiteboard meetings (as well as during the scramble after initial plans inevitably changed), project managers would ask, say, about the availability of certain welders with the right certifications for a certain job. So Jones would mine the human resource database, report back on who was qualified, and the frantic hunt began.

Jones and her team knew things needed to change—but how? The whiteboard approach seemed to work well in theory. Projects (the “what” in this equation) could be erased or revised as needed. It was the “who” that presented problems, the “who” being one of more than 300 skilled employees.

“We couldn’t house all that employee information on a whiteboard,” Jones said. “So we decided we really needed an electronic whiteboard with a database behind it.”

The company hunted for off-the-shelf software, but it couldn’t find anything that could meet their specific needs. They didn’t want anything fancy with exotic capacity planning algorithms, and they didn’t want managers to have to navigate through a complicated web of screens. They simply wanted to know who was qualified to do what, and who was doing what and when. The simpler it could be, the faster managers could react to changes.

So Jones reached out to the company’s technology manager, who in turn reached out to a software developer who could help. The vision was, again, to have a kind of electronic whiteboard, touch-friendly and mobile-friendly, in which managers could see available workers for the week, then touch or click on a worker and see his or her stat sheet immediately, including the employees’ training, certifications, and job classifications. Indeed, if a tradesperson with the wrong job classification performs work on certain job sites, a company can be fined to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars.

So ideally, with a single touch or click, a project manager should be able to see if, say, a welder is trained in gas metal arc welding, gas tungsten arc welding, has certain code-welding certifications, and has the right job classification, as well as simple things like a person’s picture, phone number, and mailing address. After all, because the company has more than 300 employees, not everyone knows everyone else. If a project manager or foreman is meeting someone at a job site, it helps to have a picture and phone number. And if that welder happens to live close by (which the project manager would know, simply by seeing a person’s mailing address), managers can strategically schedule that welder for certain job sites—so he spends less time driving and more time working.

“This is information that seems so simple,” Jones said, “but you just can’t have on an actual whiteboard.”

From this development effort came a software package called JobPointe, which the company began using in late 2017 and now sells licenses to other companies in the skilled trades. Think plumbers, electricians, and other kinds of building contractors.

“We can pull it on the phone, on a tablet, or on the computer,” Jones explained, “and it’s real-time too. So if you make manpower shifts, the software is updated immediately.”

Beth Jester, marketing manager, added that the software is not built around typical shift scheduling but instead around long-term projects and the resource planning that goes with them. “As it stands now, it’s able to tell you the current outlook on jobs, and it can build projections and forecasts.”

It does this essentially by looking at other jobs on the “virtual” whiteboard, virtually “written in” by the company’s project managers. If it sees a customer has a plant shutdown in two months and will need five certified welders with certain job classifications for a week, it will factor that into long-term project planning. “This gives you a projection moving forward of your labor force,” Jones said.

Project managers establish the schedule in the software once a contract is awarded. “And JobPointe helps us maintain that schedule,” Jones explained, adding that it factors in peaks and lulls in demand, both for a specific job as well as all jobs overall.

She added that the software isn’t tied in with the company’s estimating software but simply works off of actual and projected time spent on a job. However, through a simple export process, a manager can log on to JobPointe, export data to the estimating software, and compare actual versus estimated times and see the variance. Although Andy J. Egan doesn’t use these functions of the JobPointe platform, its export function also can work for other business software platforms, like scheduling modules and other components of enterprise resource planning.

Moreover, JobPointe has helped the company keep an accurate count of people in-house, on the fabrication shop floor—because, again, a welder or other tradesperson at Andy J. Egan may spend a few days in the shop followed by a week at a job site. So if a customer, one outside the mechanical contracting side of the business, orders a fabrication project, in-house managers can see who’s available when and what they’re trained and certified to do.

She added that the software doesn’t prohibit such double-booking outright. It simply alerts the manager of the situation. After talking with the welder and his supervisor, the manager may well find out that the welder can be double-booked during that time and still finish the work.

“This isn’t a minute-by-minute scheduling software,” Jones said. “It takes a macro view. We have some individuals who can, say, work on three different customer projects in a week. But we want to know that he’s on those, so you can tag those jobs to him in the software, so that there are no surprises.”

Automated emails help prevent surprises too. JobPointe sends emails to certain individuals automatically. And not everyone needs every email; a project manager can customize the system so that each person gets the notifications that he or she needs, no more and no less. This avoids the wave of mass emails managers used to receive.

Calmer Days

The company has only just begun with JobPointe. With the first phases implemented, it now is working on future phases, code-named ToolPointe, that would incorporate capacity planning for tools and equipment.

Today Jones’ workday is far different than what it was. Managers used to constantly march into her office and ask about who was available when, and who had the necessary certifications and classifications to do this or that job.

“Now it’s at their fingertips,” she said. “Everybody can pull up their own searches and filters and see who’s available. A person can leave for a day or go on vacation, and the entire operation isn’t lost. And the time spent with planning meetings is dramatically shorter.”

In short, it’s made for days with fewer meetings and fewer surprises. Work is calmer—which, from a work-life balance perspective, isn’t a bad return on investment.

Photos courtesy of Andy J. Egan Co., www.andyegan.com, www.jobpointe.com.