Publishing Production Scheduling and Management
Business Problem:
An international print and publishing organization (P&P) is responsible for producing over 7000 unique products per year. The P&P’s responsibility is to manage the creation of multiple customized products for multiple clients. The existing product management process included minimal and inaccurate tracking of the process.
P&P was experiencing budget overruns and delivery delays. Budget overruns resulted from inaccurate labor hour collection, lack of vendor management, and rework due to unclear or changing specifications. Delivery delays were directly related to improper scheduling and planning of resources, vendors, and approvals. Specifically, the major business problems that needed to be solved were:
- Publication Specifications
- Inability to effectively track and communicate the status of tasks
- Failure to accurately manage and communicate job status
- Eliminate handwritten notations that were illegible, overlooked or lost
- Eliminate redundant keying efforts when posting job and payroll information to back office systems (i.e., Peoplesoft, Profile)
- Task Scheduling and Management
- Reduce or eliminate significant manual effort needed to schedule a job or make adjustments to a job
- Reduce the need for frequent status meetings
- Eliminate time recording inconsistencies and data integrity problems due to erroneous information being posted to multiple time recording systems.
- Inability of MAC to access systems
- Financial Management
- Confusion in customer billings due to lack of billing detail at the product level - current billing detail is done at the P&P Project Job Ticket level
- Difficulty in accurately reporting and budgeting due to lack of real-time information access and information detail
- Inability to automatically track budget variances
- Eliminate manual keying of online journal entries, budget, actuals and maintenance of salary grades
- Eliminate lack of association between purchase orders and actual production costs
- Reporting
- Failure to have access to real-time production information for analysis, decision making, and customer service
- Eliminate personal databases by providing a central repository for information
- Corporate Interfaces
- Eliminate manual and redundant data entry
- Document Management
- Application and server performance issues result in Publication documents being worked from local hard drives and not from the Server - Publication documents are not always replicated back to the
- Server - good communication prevents significant file sharing issues
- Quoting
- Eliminate manual quoting process which is prone to significant delays and errors.
P & P desired a comprehensive enterprise solution to accommodate the unique requirements of an organization that must manage the creation of multiple customized products for multiple clients as outlined above. The Product Management System will allow for the dynamic creation of product specification and schedule templates. Through the use of a relational database, the application integrates the interactions between schedules, budgets, actual expenses, resource allocations, activity tracking and corporate reporting. The solution would seamlessly integrate all aspects of product management into one managed system eliminating redundant data entry and reducing manual processes. The desired result was a unified, customizable product management system that facilitates the creation of product schedules based on user-defined templates that can support any number of industries and product types.
Solution:
RESolutions Consulting developed a web-enabled EJB (Enterprise Java Beans) compliant business application designed to control and facilitate the process of scheduling, budgeting, tracking actual expenses, allocating resources, and reporting for the creation of products and/or the delivery of services to multiple clients. The application was built over an object/relational model. The application is designed to manage multiple customers and multiple products with multiple resources. The application supports a varied view of the information, including, but not limited to, such things as detailed views of an individual employee's "To do" list, tasks or projects that are behind schedule, and reports displaying the profitability of multiple products for multiple clients. The creation of the Product Management System (PMS) gives P&P the ability to efficiently manage and control the creation of products for their customers. PMS will seamlessly integrate P&P functions into one unified management process. PMS users achieve optimal productivity and quality through a user-friendly system interface. Job-ticket tracking, scheduling, workflow, document management and financial management are automated resulting in a proactive versus a reactive work environment. PMS aids P&P in the creation of quality products on time, on budget, and at a competitive price.
Each product in the system has a custom set of characteristics:
- Publication Specifications The Publication Specifications function of PPMS will replace the business process of the Profile System - it will support the dynamic creation of user-defined job-ticket templates and specifications.
- Task Manager The Task Manager (TM) function of PPMS will allow for the creation of Schedules and tracking of tasks by job-ticket - TM will support the dynamic creation of user-defined schedule templates and schedule tasks.
- Financial Management The Financial Management function of PPMS will support the management of financial information required by the customers, pubs, and corporate.
- Document Management The Document Management function of PPMS will be a repository for all electronic storage of assets and objects associated with a job-ticket.
- Reporting The Reporting function of PPMS will allow P&P extensive reporting capabilities.
- Quotes The Quoting function of PPMS allows for the creation of quotes.
- Corporate Interfaces PPMS will interface with PeopleSoft, FIS, and IPS - the interfaces are detailed in the supplemental Specification and Use Cases.
- Table Maintenance The Table Maintenance function of PPMS allows for the maintenance of referential tables
System functionality includes:
- Ability to create user-defined product templates, specification templates, and schedule templates
- Ability to create budgets and track actual expenses at many levels. For example; by resource, task, department, product or customer
- Ability to create a note or attach e-mail at the customer, project, product or task level
- Automatic creation of standardized e-mail messages based on user-defined triggers
- View "To do" lists by customer, department, individual, and resource pool
- View budget information at any level of detail or summarization
The benefits of the Product Management System include:
- Intuitively integrates into the workflows and processes of the company. Instead of being driven by the application, the users drive the setup and usage of the application
- Dynamically displays information, driven by user-defined templates
- Integrates and consolidates activities such as scheduling, budgeting, management reporting, and financial reporting
- Can be utilized by many different industries for the management of high volume customized product types
- Stores the application data in a relational database, which gives the client's management team access to information that is needed to run their business and gives employees the information, needed to perform their day-to-day jobs.
Return on Investment (ROI):
The following is a partial list of the ROI achieved by P&P:
- Reduced the product planning time from hours to minutes
- Eliminated redundant data entry of timesheet information 3 points to 1 point of entry and reduced errors at the same time
- Enabled collaboration and notification of changes and modifications, that eliminated rework, and unproductive meetings
- Reduced total cost of ownership by making a browser-based solution, thus reducing IT support costs
