BlueLine Manufacturing sees big growth thanks to E2

Nov. 13, 2012 - PRLog -- 　

BlueLine was first established in August of 1999 (Incorporated in October 1999). The company was started on the premise that this would be no "ordinary" machine shop. The goal was to hire the best and setup a strong foundation of key people to build the business on. If the employees are happy, they will be productive and build good parts. Not an easy task, but that is exactly what we did. It did not take long for us to create quite a buzz and get the word out. We offered something different. Our impressive benefit package, strong work ethics, uncompromised quality, and desire to actually offer a "special service" to the industry made sure when we hire people, they stayed. We are really close to our employees much like an extended family. We have picnics, parties, crawfish boils, and cook-outs for the employees and their families. We grew from 3 to 100 employees and two locations in under 8 years. The work environment is not traditional either. We have painted shop floors in a climate controlled facility, internet workstations in an employee break area for all to use, and seniority work schedules.

"Quoting was always something we had issues with before E2. After a joint effort, our sales team was able to integrate the E2 module and we now quote more accurately. This also allowed for a more uniform quoting process for all sales staff plus a better response time for our production personnel and allowed for quotes to be turned into orders with virtually a few mouse clicks."

"Order entry is the back bone of our system. We are able to watch inventory levels, monitor employee performances, and provide real time updates on jobs to our customers. We have reduced the frequency of our complete inventory counts due to the sub reports on the job traveler. Using the Job Traveler throughout the shop to report production times on jobs allows the shop managers to view performances in a short time frame and enables them to fix problems before the escalate to larger ones. Order entry is also utilized to give reporting to our customers. Each department manager updates orders through unique work codes and other user defined fields so up to date status reports can be extracted and emailed to sales staff with little effort. This has reduced non-value added time by 50%."

"BlueLine utilizes the E2 scheduling module for real time updating and daily balancing work of loads in a competitive job shop environment. Our Shop Managers use the E2 generated "Scheduled Start Dates" as production guidelines which states when a specific job should be started and on what particular work center. These schedules allow us to more accurately achieve promised delivery dates to our customers. Our Sales staff also makes use of the loading summaries within the E2 scheduling module to monitor back logs for more realistic quoting promise dates. Production personnel utilize loading summaries as well for balancing overbooked work centers and unallocated hours. Since BlueLine has multiple locations working off of the same SQL database, Production managers have the transparency to move overbooked hours to machine work centers at other facilities with little problems."

The E2 Shop System is comprehensive manufacturing software that puts total shop floor control at your fingertips. Designed just for job shops and make-to-order or contract manufacturers, E2 equips you to see your business like never before, and get the big picture on the best way to manage it.