Radio Frequency Company

Monitoring Costs

Now live on the current version, RFC has the ability to better manage their complex projects, which can last six months or more, and stay on top of project budgets with instant access to timely and detailed cost information throughout the project lifecycle-from RFC’s suppliers through the manufacturing process, installation at the customer’s site, and into post sale service and support. “Our equipment has complex designs and manufacturing processes. An RFC unit is built in sections and broken down into the major components of the finished product. These major component assemblies themselves can incur budgets in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. One of the biggest issues we had before migrating was how Project and Accounting Managers as well as upper management could monitor how projects were performing against their budgets. We had no mechanism for monitoring this in real time with the detail we needed. Everything was done manually. Project Managers’ time was absorbed by clerical work that the system can now do. Producing cost reports is now at the touch of a button,” states Lisa Mitchell, Purchasing Manager for RFC.

Now with glovia.com Project Accounting, RFC has the ability to capture all project costs and provide all the information necessary to evaluate project status, avoid runaway costs, and ensure effective budget management.

In addition, glovia.com also provides project-to-date totals enabling RFC to calculate and compare their estimates and budget projections with actual incurred costs and revenue.

“What we did in the past was to create a parent work order, with the BOM’s for the major components. Then the Project Manager reviewed the work order report and manually opened all lower-level work orders related to the project under a single work order. This was both tedious and rife with potential for error. Now by using glovia.com Project Accounting, SEIBAN and PRP tools everyone can find all their relevant project data and related work orders by project. PRP creates all the work orders for made items off the bills of material of the major components, as well as creating purchase requisitions for material shortages all automatically. This frees up our Project Managers’ time to focus on the critical aspects of project management allowing our managers to identify problems quickly and minimize their impact on budgets and delivery schedules. This is how their time should be spent,” comments Brian Maley, IT Manager for RFC.

“Previously, manual costing reports would take significant accounting resources to compile a report from work order detail cost reports. But these could not be compared to the original budget. There was no opportunity for the Project Managers to get quick up-to-the-minute progress costing reports,” continues Mitchell. “With glovia.com’s Project Accounting, Project Managers can access costing information for ongoing projects, whenever required, from detailed reports that also include the dollar value of committed materials on purchase orders or work orders that have not yet been issued. A summary report will give upper management the cost break down of the major, assemblies that compares to the budget. A project running over budget will now have visibility during the production cycle, not discovered at the end of the project when it’s too late too react. Now we hope to be proactive to these situations as they arise. And since the reports drill down to individual work orders, the overrun causes can be pinpointed to a specific area which can be addressed now and for the future.”

Another important area for RFC is the ability to use glovia.com as a method for evaluating the quotation process. “We are now able to accurately answer vital questions such as: Are we looking at all aspects of the cost? Have we got our labor hours correct on the work orders? Do we have our costs correct in the system? If we’re estimating it’s going to cost us X amount of money to make a unit, then at the end of manufacturing did our estimate come close to the actual? Being able to monitor this information and make sure we are staying on track and within budget is supremely important to timely and profitable management of our projects,” comments Mitchell.

By using glovia.com Project Accounting, SEIBAN and PRP tools everyone can find all their relevant project data and related work orders by project. This frees up our Project Managers’ time to focus on the critical aspects of project management allowing our managers to identify problems quickly and minimize their impact on budgets and delivery schedules. This is how their time should be spent.

Automating Project Management

glovia.com enables RFC to manage their complex projects more effectively, directing information to the people who need it and organizing it by fiscal period or by assembly or both. The end-to-end solution manages everything from defining the project scope and developing realistic estimates and quotes to optimizing the use of resources and managing costs. Throughout the project lifecycle RFC can track all expenses and have total, enterprise-wide, real-time visibility into project status.

glovia.com has also simplified and streamlined the capture of labor hours for RFC. “We have many one time costs, such as engineering costs, that had to be captured with on a work order. But by making this a separate activity within a project and posting the labor hours against that activity makes it easier to post and track these costs,” continues Mitchell.

Prior to migrating, modifying and re-modifying project plans was tedious and made analysis very difficult. It was very time consuming and difficult to manually keep accurate records considering the complexity of our equipment.” continues Mitchell. “Now the process has been automated using PRP which saves Project Managers valuable time and vastly improves accuracy enabling us to keep production, engineering and supply synchronized and complete our projects on time and on budget.”

“This also keeps our Project Managers from being clerks for ‘half their life’ because they no longer have to manually open up each individual work order. Previously a very large portion of a Project Manager’s day was spent on clerical duties instead of paying attention to what was happening on the plant floor. With glovia.com project managers are saving several hours a day in clerical duties,” adds Maley.

A Winning Partnership

“CrescentOne is enabling us to improve our ability to plan and manage our complex ETO/MTO projects, all the while staying on top of our project accountability with timely and detailed cost and revenue information. As our requirements have changed, CrescentOne has been there and supported us with new functionality to meet our growing business needs and to help ensure our business is as successful as possible,” concludes Kosky.