ELITE MANUFACTURING COMPANY DRILLS DOWN DEEPER WITH LancetCoach™
REMMELE ENGINEERING IS A TRUSTED QUALITY MANUFACTURING PARTNER FOR FIRMS IN AEROSPACE, DEFENSE AND MEDICAL DEVICE MARKETS Remmele offers precision machining and manufacturing engineering services, as well as supply sourcing, assembly/integration, and other key services and technologies that are essential to today's most demanding and rigorous applications. Headquartered in the Twin Cities of Minnesota, Remmele offers global solutions for some of manufacturing's hardest problems.
THE SITUATION
With consistent performance, innovation and quality on the line every day, Remmele must manage, analyze and understand its costs - then report on them as concisely and clearly as possible. The difficulty lies in the complexity of Remmele's projects. A project can consist of hundreds of manufacturing shop orders and purchase orders and thousands of labor and inventory transactions. Typically the data was input into the ERP system with an Oracle database. But the challenge was getting the information out in a report that summarized project costs and status, while providing drill-down access to all the supporting detail.
Recently the company found a way to bring its data together and get a complete look at their operations. Remmele used Business Intelligence tools from MicroStrategy and a short-term mentoring program from Lancet Software called LancetCoach that ultimately provided Remmele cost reports with both macro- and micro-views.
THE SOLUTION
With a LancetCoach available by phone, online and onsite during a four-month period working with Remmele's staff, the team devised a way to report on complex projects that showed actual, estimated and standard costs for labor, machining, overhead, outside services and material. The solution also reported projected completion costs for these projects. The reports included summaries and separate drill paths to show all actual cost details by cost type. In short, Remmele and their LancetCoach, Bruce Boelter, were able to bring the data together in a central data warehouse, align it and then report on it.
"We used the LancetCoach experience to learn MicroStrategy while simultaneously completing a cost-reporting process that Remmele was unable to do for several years," notes Ken Weyandt, Applications Systems Analyst for Remmele Engineering. "Lancet knew how to use the software and we knew our business, the source ERP system and the Oracle database. There were times when we struggled to get what we wanted. In some cases that involved changing our data warehouse, but we were in good hands."
Remmele's team met with the LancetCoach once per week during the 12-week assignment and if changes were necessary, they were made during coaching sessions. "This allowed us to always be productive during subsequent sessions," Weyandt says.
"That's exactly how LancetCoach is designed to work," notes Bruce Boelter, Remmele's coach. "By combining a fast start with ongoing project mentoring Remmele got lower-cost development, a set of best practices, and experienced BI guidance," he adds.
THE RESULTS
The cost-reporting project was completed early within the coaching engagement and Remmele's reporting process has been entirely renovated. "Today our project managers can view the results of complex projects in a unified reporting solution," Weyandt explains. And with Remmele's objectives met ahead of schedule, it gave the team and its coach more time to explore other capabilities within MicroStrategy. "That extra time allowed us to see advanced techniques that capitalized on the years of experience that our LancetCoach had in creating business solutions in MicroStrategy."
"I advise anyone who uses a LancetCoach like Bruce to also combine the coaching with MicroStrategy training to complete difficult projects," Weyandt points out. "Also, if the coach and staff can remove any obstacles that arise in their source systems between sessions, you will get the most value and time out of the coaching process."
We used the LancetCoach experience to learn MicroStrategy while simultaneously completing a cost-reporting process that Remmele was unable to do for several years. Lancet knew how to use the software and we knew our business...- Ken Weyandt, Applications Systems Analyst, Remmele Engineering