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 Many Table Setups can a Lineal Saw Support?

Let’s talk about a plant built around a single lineal saw. Is it practical for some kinds of plants, but not others? To answer this, we’ll attempt to estimate how many truss assembly work stations a lineal saw can support, recognizing that different plants have different mixes of residential, commercial and agricultural work.

This will be highly simplistic, but may shed some light nevertheless.

Creating Cut Pieces on Lineal Saws

How many pieces an hour can a lineal saw cut? Clearly, having an automated infeed system and a full time person catching the lumber on the back end of the saw will make a considerable difference. Some of the literature from manufacturers claim the saws can cut 450 pieces per hour (7.5 per minute.) Certain sales reps, those practical fellows that have a reputation to consider, have been quoted as saying about

300 pieces per hour (5 per minute.) To be safe, let’s also consider we might only get half that number (2.5 per minute.) We’ll look at all three numbers (best, most likely, and worst case) in creating estimates.

Consuming Cut Pieces on Tables

Since production figures vary so greatly I want to start with an extreme case. Imagine a plant that never has to set up a truss, it simply builds 28’ fink trusses all day, every day. If that crew, working on one workstation, can build one truss (10 pieces) a minute, then it is pretty easy to calculate that there is no way, even in the best case scenario, that the saw (7.5 pieces per minute) can keep up with the table (10 pieces per minute.) But one truss a minute is p

retty fast. What if it takes five minutes for each truss? Now the table is consuming 120 pieces (12 trusses x 10 pcs/trs) per hour and a lineal saw would have no trouble keeping up – it probably would even be able to support two workstations building these 28’ finks.

Conclusion: In this ultra-simplistic scenario, if your workstation can build one truss a minute, a lineal saw cannot keep up. If that workstation takes five minutes a truss, the saw can keep up – no problem.

Let’s look at the same idea, but with a more complex truss, a cathedral truss with 14 pieces. In this case, if the table can produce a truss in less than three minutes, the saw will have a hard time keeping up.

In these charts, the red boxes indicate “the saw cannot keep up,” even in the ‘best case’ scenario. Orange or lighter means the saw will keep up – if our ‘best guess’ for lineal saw output is correct. To create metrics using units that may be more familiar, note that our fink has 65.33 BF; the cathedral 71.33. The BF/MH column indicates what a plant, with a three man crew, would produce per man hour producing nothing but finks or cathedrals with no setup time.

So much for “theoretical” truss plants. I know of a plant in the Far West described as “highly efficient” that produces pretty chopped up work at a rate of 110 BF/MH. These man-hours include only the three guys working the tables. If this is a “highly efficient” plant, let’s speculate that a plant that is merely “efficient” can produce 100 BF/MH. To keep things simple, let’s borrow the ‘number of pieces’ and ‘board footage’ from the cathedral truss above and assume that those represent a typical truss at this plant. This would mean that each workstation at this ‘efficient plant’ produces 300 BF or 4.2 trusses per hour, or one truss every 14 ¼ minutes. Going a step further, we can arrive at these numbers:

If our assumptions (3 men per table, average truss is 71.33 BF and has 14 pieces) are correct, then a lineal saw at a 100 BF/MH plant can support at least two workstations and perhaps as many as four.

Summary:

·Lineal saws can cut between 1200 and 3600 pieces per shift. This roughly equates to 6,000 – 18,000 BF depending on saw efficiency and mix of 2x4, 2x6, etc.

·A lineal saw can almost certainly keep up with two assembly workstations in all but the most efficient lines

·For custom residential work, a single lineal saw may be able to supply as many as four workstations

If you want a copy of the spreadsheet I used for his analysis, just drop me a line.

Dividing Work Between Saws

How do divide up your work among your saws? Chords to one, webs to another? Or do you find it easier to send certain types of jobs to your "A" saw, and other types of jobs to your "B" saw?

Before Automated Saws

Prior to the development of highly automated component saws (around 1995) the conventional wisdom suggested that two saws were best because:

1. Saws are the production bottlenecks and we need at least two saws to keep up with one 100' gantry.

2. If one saw breaks down, we won't be totally shut down.

Before 1990, there were large saws for chords and a smaller ones for webs. The web saw was more compact, meaning less distance for the sawyer to cover between blades to set them up.

The Current Landscape - Different Saw Lineups at Different Plants

Today, a relatively small number of component operations cut their pieces primarily using a single saw - either a component saw or lineal saw. One MiTek account manager I know is convinced if you are going to build your operation around a single saw, that that saw should be a component saw. Component saws are popular, of course, and have been the workhorse of the industry for many years.

In spite of this, in recent years several startup plants have chosen to begin with a single linear saw. Several ideas have driven this decision:

1. The lineal saw is better suited to a 'just in time' production process

2. Lineal saws can cut "chopped up" (high 'setup to run' ratio) work more efficiently

3. Lineal saws produce less waste

4. There is very little a lineal saw cannot cut, meaning a simple manual radial arm saw is the only "backup" saw needed. A plant with a single component saw is best complimented by a more expensive, semi- automatic radial saw.

5. In some cases, a lineal saw is less expensive than a component saw.

Most truss operations have two or more "major" saws, either multiple component saws or a component paired with a lineal saw. Let's look at the first of these two, the multiple component saws shop, first. As mentioned earlier, component saws used to be more specialized than they are today. Some were more clearly "chord saws" and others "web" saws. Today, component saws are designed to be equally proficient at either. As a result, although some plants parse their cutting lists into "chords" and "webs" and send them to different saws, many simply alternate - sending complete jobs to each saw.

If your truss operation has an older, semi-automatic saw and a newer, fully automatic component saw then sending the chords to the "old" saw and the webs to the "new" saw makes a lot of sense. Another strategy is to split the work between the two based on quantity. For example, If there are 10 ore more pieces that are identical, send them to the "old" saw, and all quantities less than 10 to the "new" saw.

The other 'multiple major saw' scenario is the component and lineal saw combo. Although arguably the "best of both worlds," there is by no means a consensus about how best to divide work between the two. Here are some of the ways people divide work between their component and lineal saws:

1. "Straight run" jobs go to the component saw, "chopped up" jobs to the lineal saw. This is a variation on the "quantity-based" strategy mentioned in the last section. The advantage here is simply keeping the entire job on one saw.

2. Chords to the component, webs to the lineal, a modern-day version of the "two saw" strategy of twenty years ago.

3. Attempt to keep the saws equally busy by implementing the "quantity based" strategy, but changing the quantity as one saw gets ahead of the other. As an example, you give your component saw all trusses with quantity over 5, and your lineal saw gets the rest. You find you component saw getting ahead, and so you change the rule and start to give the component saw all trusses with quantity over 4.

Reviewing, we have seen several strategies for dividing work among multiple saws:

1. Job by Job - I use my judgment and send some jobs to "A" and some to "B." I do this on the basis of either the type of work it is, or which saw is currently "ahead."

2. Role - Each saw plays a role, such as "Chord saw," "Web Saw," "Panel Saw," and work for that role is sent to that saw.

3. Quantity - By splitting my cutting lists using quantity of pieces or trusses, I send work with more "setups" to the quicker (to setup) saw, and work with more "runs" to the slower (to setup) saw.

Thinking through these "utilization of saws" discussion, many questions suggest themselves:

· At what point will a single linear saw be unable to keep up with a plant's work?

· Is it worth keeping an old, inefficient saw in production when the work could be done on a more efficient saw?

· Is there a way to decide with numbers which strategy is best?

We will tackle these questions in future newsletters.