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.
