Pat,
The big problem in the Store Fixture industry back then was there were so many options, colors ,configuration that when companies got to the product configurator side is was extremely time consuming and difficult.

That was a good seminar.

Some time around 2005 a major store fixture MFG took over an account we used to service. There was a roll around condiment cart with applied panels. All in rift oak, pretty simple to build. They had us do them as it took them 14 weeks to produce a one off like that based on the time it took to build in their ERP system.

Molding and flooring with a defined product line would be much simpler to build and add options.

We have worked for other store fixture mfg that have ERP systems working. I think it might of become easier than it was 16-17 years ago.

Still the custom configuration part is the time issue if you use ERP for BOM in a make to order environment.

Yeah the seminar was good, they were not pushing ERP, did I imply that it wasn't?

I remember talking to a guy at the show that worked for one of the big hardware manufacturers. He said that they loved their ERP/MRP software.

I think you nailed it, the setup time/opportunity cost is too much for custom/short run work.

Maybe David's setup lends itself to ERP software, but it seems to me that he should at least consider good accounting software.

Have you looked into lean systems instead? It seems to me that if Toyota can run a multi-billion dollar production facility making a product that contains 70,000 parts with a Kanban system using index cards, you don't really need a fancy software program to tell you what boards to send through the moulder.

I forgot to mention that for your credit card processing and order entry you should consider an ecommerce store front. Too many wood product companies have website that are blogs/informational only. By having your site set up an an e-commerce system you can easily make sales.

The two most popular and easy to work with are Shopify or BigCommerce. We use BigCommerce because they allow a lot more product options than Shopify, and if you partner with their CC processor the rates are lower.

Jerry,

Kanban won't work for our manufacturing. The advantage Toyota has is that they have very limited options. Yes, a huge variety of final products based on those options, but for instance you can't order Burgundy Kangaroo leather interior no matter how much you pay or how long you're willing to wait.

While a good part of our production is from a discrete list of materials, there are lots of raw materials that we purchase as needed for orders in house. For instance 6/4 Cherry. I may have a little bit left from the last time we had a job for it, but I am not going to maintain 500-1,000-10,000 BF, as I just don't use it often enough.

We do use an index card system for supplies and some of our secondary products, so I am familiar with the process and can see it working very well in certain circumstances. However I don't believe our primary manufacturing is one of them. Even with the secondary products, we mostly don't use it. We are talking about natural wood moulding, and we make it into custom sized frames to order. It's not like a box of bolts, where each one is that same and you can put 2 boxes on the shelf and order/pull another when the first one get emptied. We often will pull all the material in the bay out to find the right 2-3 pieces we need to make the order, and then put the rest back. We can't even make level lines that trigger an order when below a certain stacked volume, as everything is sorted by length and depending what lengths you have you can have vastly different total quantities, and/or a "hill and valley" effect that makes determining a level difficult, and some items are in 2-3 bins because of needed volume. Besides that, because many of our mouldings are similar enough to be grouped into "families" that save setup time, with ERP we are able to look at all items in each family, check current levels, determine stocking level on-the-fly based on usage, and print out a report of how much to make of each one. Manually trying to do that could take hours per week. One more - a customer just called and wanted to know if we had something in stock. With an ERP system I was able to tell them within seconds on the call, rather than having someone physically check and then call them back.

I like the idea of using online for CC and letting someone else deal with the PCI etc. But I don't see shutting off our in-house processing. While most of our customers do have email now, many are not comfortable using the internet. We get most of our orders by phone, then fax, and lastly a combination of email and/or our online ordering system. I would be afraid that forcing our customers to use the internet to place and pay for orders would cause a general revolt. If we were getting all orders via the internet I'd want them to be ported directly into whatever I was using to create orders and do invoicing.

BTW, I do have and use Quickbooks for 4 other low-volume-transaction companies that we run, so I'm familiar with it, and can't see using it to run this business.

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Have you researched this software ?
http://mouldingcalculator.com/wood-moulding-estimating/