Things You Can Do With MBA

MiTek’s Business Application (MBA)has grown a lot since its inception 15 years ago. That presents a problem, and several people I’ve talked to have said, “I know I’m not using all of its capabilities.” To help, I’ll present a short summary of its capabilities.

Overview

MBA enables a component manufacturer to keep records of all of the quotes and orders processed by the business. By directly reading the design files (trusses, wall panels,) the actual material used can be quickly and accurately summarized. Ancillary items, such as hangers, loose material, and any other items supplied can be added to quotes and orders. Using the wealth of information available about the components, labor estimates can be generated. Customizable reports allow the creation of quotes, production lists, and management reports.

Managing Your Business

You can get started with MBA with nothing more than a numbering system. However, the more information you store for each job, the more information you can get out of the system. Setting up customers and sales reps is a first step, enabling you to see how many quotes are becoming orders and tracking sales rep activity. Different markups can be applied to different customers or customer groups.

Classifying the job by type (Roof, Floor, Custom, Ag, Government, Multi-Family, etc.) allows you to look at subsets of your job mix. The more categories, the more you can examine the work you do and look for problems and opportunities.

Territories are an underutilized concept. You can use Territories for tracking your success in different markets, or set up loading territories so that you can make sure that the correct codes and loads are applied to the jobs delivered to a given area. Different tax codes and delivery charges can be linked to different territories.

Quotes and Orders can be stored separately, so that a record of the original quote is preserved even after extensive changes to the order.

Some of the most complicated customizations of MBA have been in labor estimating. Although the user can set up an almost endless variety of different schemes, custom programming is sometimes needed if you want to “look ahead” at the other trusses in the job to determine setup costs and labor.

Detailed analysis of individual orders and ‘summary reports’ of a group of orders can be done with the report writer. The reports “out of the box” are never enough for creative managers, who will always think of new ways to look at the accumulated data. Technical reps can make some changes to existing reports “over the phone,” and many customers have a person on their staff that has learned how to customize reports, and thus avoiding any delay in seeing how the ‘latest change’ on a favorite report will look.

As the Design Console

The MBA is best utilized as the “desktop” for all of your design work. Once a job or quote is started, you simply hit the “layout” button and MBA creates the job folder, launches the layout application, and keeps track of where everything is. This saves a lot of time when compared to creating the layout or the trusses first, and then having to ‘show’ MBA where the job is when you want to import the design work.

Comment or changes can be recorded in the job’s Call Log and minor changes (such as a delivery date change) are recorded automatically in the Change Log so the entire history of the order can be tracked. Attachments, such as a scan of the customer’s purchase order or photos from the job site can be attached to the order. The Job Navigator allows you to create customized lists for each user, for example a designer could have a list of “Work Assigned” to them, and another list of “All Orders Overdue to the Shop.”

Production Pre-planning

One of the most popular tools in MBA is called Build-a-Batch, which allows a user to organize all of the components in a job into production (table) groups. Once ‘batches’ are created, production paperwork can be generated for each group, including batch cutting. Build-a-Batch’s ability to see each truss, the quantity, span, pitch and visually ‘drag and drop’ into different groups makes the process very easy. Individual trusses can even have their quantities split into more than one group, if needed.

Although a simple “Delivery Date” field can be used for scheduling , a flexible Calendar Scheduling feature allows work to be assigned to the whole shop, or particular workstations. As work is added, a graph shows remaining capacity for each resource.

Other Tools

A set of standard trusses can be created, and used to create price lists or do “quick quotes” without having to (re-)do design work.

User security is managed in MBA, limiting access to defaults, making certain changes, and running certain reports.

A stand-alone Inventory module is available to help manage lumber and plates.

How Trusses will be Priced in the Future

Although today you may be a “board footer,” or a “material times factor guy” or even a “time and motion person,” at sometime in the future you will be pricing your trusses and wall panels using a completely different system then you are today. I can I be so certain of this? It’s because there is a way to price components that simply makes too much sense not to use, and the tools to enable you to use this method either already are, or shortly will be, available to you.

What computers are good at

Beginning in the 1980’s running each individual truss on a computer replaced referencing a standard design in a manual. It did not take long to realize that the computer’s ability to calculate the truss’s material content (BF) or cost ($), (while checking the structural integrity) was too valuable and easy NOT to use. This spawned The Big Three pricing methods:

Board Foot x Factor – Flexible in that it can be used regardless of truss type (girder, attic,) simple in that you are dealing with one computer-generated number (BF) and one variable (the “Factor.”) Limited in that the Factor must take into account a lumber cost index, labor, markup and overhead.

Material Cost x Factor – Same idea – one computer generated number, one variable. Board footage and material cost tell the estimator nothing about the complexity of the truss, so either the complexity is ignored or has to be subjectively applied by looking at the profile of each truss.

Time and Motion – This is my shorthand name for any labor estimating formula composed of setup factors and “run” factors. It uses any number of calculable items about the truss to create the formula. For example, it might use the number of joints and pieces to estimate the setup time for the first truss, and the number of pieces to calculate how long it will take to build the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc. trusses – possibly adding a surcharge for long pieces, or 2x6 pieces, or longer trusses. A Time and Motion method always charges more per truss for smaller quantities and less per truss for larger quantities. Despite its obvious strengths, the Time and

Motion method, like its simpler cousins, still involves guessing; the difference is that the guessing involves more variables. More computer generated numbers paired with more Factors. The higher complexity of this method appeals to some, and puts off nearly as many.

As long as we attempt to use one of the “Big Three” to estimate labor (and other price factors) we are playing guessing game. Our Factors may have proven themselves worthy over the long haul, but on an individual job we frankly are going to have very little clue as to the what the factor should be, or why. When it comes to adding things up, computers are king. The “tough nut” is figuring the labor, and a computer examining a truss on a computer screen is innately limited in what it can do. Why? Because it is not looking at several things that we know intuitively are needed to really estimate what the labor cost will be.

What current methods lack

When using standard methods to price, we are not taking into account:

·What trusses will be built together? (what larger production group is the truss part of?)

·How will the pieces be parsed (what saw?) and sorted (in what order?)

·On which work centers will the trusses be built?

Looking at this in more detail, we know, or can figure out, what production groups the job will be subdivided into. We know how we batch jobs for the saw and what our sorting routines are. We know what table and stations we are most likely to build certain trusses on. And we know, or learn over time, the typical metrics for each piece of equipment (setup time per piece, run time per piece (saw) and per truss (table.)

We know all these things, but we don’t use them for estimating. Truss pricing in the future will.

The future

The pricing of the future will be by plant simulation. Once the design work is done (at least the initial pass,) the job passes to the plant simulator which:

·Knows how our saw strategies, creates a batch cutting list on the fly, and estimates the time each part of the process will take

·Knows how we break trusses into production groups, and does it

·Knows what station and table we build each type of truss, knows the metrics (expectancies) for that station, and then applies those expectancies to the work assigned to it

Plant simulation becomes an overwhelming array of numbers unless we can match those estimates up against their real-time counterparts. The “home run” here is to build an estimating simulation that includes only those metrics that you also are measuring in your plant. The more you can (or want to) measure, the more detailed (and potentially accurate) your simulation can be. This is where plant simulation differs from Time and Motion. No guessing; you need to see side by side your estimates next to your actuals.

My example is highly simplified; we would want much more detail in order to understand exactly what the difference was between what we thought would happen and what actually did happen. Plant Simulation is going to become the standard simply because no other method is as practical or accurate.