CUSTOMIZED SOFTWARE SPURS SHIPPING EFFICIENCY AT CRAFTSMAN TOOL & MOLD By Lara Copeland, assistant editor, The American Mold Builder
Imanufacturing city, Craftsman Tool & Mold opened its doors n 1965, when Chicago suburb Aurora, Illinois, was a midsize
to create precision stack mold bases and rotational spin stack mold bases for the multi-shot injection mold industry throughout North and South America. Today, as a market leader in custom mold bases, Craftsman values its customers and strives to support them as competently as possible, including during the shipment process. More than a year ago, the company took steps to improve communication with its customers during this process. “The purpose of our shipping communication system is to give our customers the information they need in order to plan their production schedules,” Craftsman’s Process Improvement Manager Dan O’Neall said. This used to be a completely manual process.
The newest update allows employees in shipping to use a smartphone to take a picture of the skid and automatically save the captured image directly to Craftsman’s file server.
“The previous system was time consuming and required a lot of manual data entry. Because of this, we did not reliably send out the shipment information to our customers,” O’Neall explained. When the schedule was busy at Craftsman, its shipping personnel either didn’t have time or forgot to send out the delivery information to customers. “They had to waste time calling or sending us an email to request the information they needed regarding their shipment. Since our customers often work on tight project schedules and deadlines, they need to know when their parts will be arriving,” he added. Without up-to-date information, the customer can’t properly schedule the rest of the project, which may lead to inefficiencies, increased costs and late deliveries. As a result, Craftsman decided to create a system that was quick and efficient in order to get the information sent to customers every time.
The employee in final assembly uses CRP to determine which orders are ready to ship, inspect those orders, capture information as the orders are processed and then forward that information to the customer via an automatic email generated through Microsoft Outlook. The system was built to be as quick and efficient as possible.
The new system uses a combination of Craftsman’s current ERP system (JobBoss) and an in-house developed software the company has named CRP (Craftsman Resource Planning). “The shipping portion is an integral part of the software,” Craftsman President Wayne Sikorcin said. “It’s the last opportunity for Craftsman to find an issue or to make sure everything was shipped so our customers receive a perfect mold base.”
“This system allows us to offer better support to our customers without increasing the burden on our employees,” O’Neall continued.
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Since its implementation, the new system has been through several iterations. It is essentially home-grown, which gives the company the ability to make enhancements as it sees fit. “It is constantly changing and improving,” O’Neall explained.
