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Thursday, October 14, 1999

Paper trail replaced with a data trail
Alice company benefits from the efficiency of using a computer system
By Andrea Jares
Caller-Times

ALICE - An Alice company that took the paper out of its metal shop and replaced it with a streamlined tracking system is getting the attention of other manufacturing companies around the country.
   When Dixie Iron Works in Alice traded the clutter of paper with a tailored computer system, managers found that the company can produce its oilfield valves and equipment faster and more precisely.
   The savings in managers, time and overhead are now making it possible for Dixie to double the number of people working on the shop floor without adding additional managers, company officials said.
   "That's because all of that paperwork that went to the shop floor, somebody in an office handled it not once, but twice," said Gerard Danos II, Dixie vice president and general manager of operations. "So there's not only clerical type people, but even managers who had a tremendous amount of paperwork that they no longer handle at all. It just doesn't exist."
   Each of the valve pieces move from lathes, mills, inspections and painting, once generating a paper trail that snowballed at each step. Often, a piece would have as many as 30 papers by the time it was bound for delivery to oilfields around the world.
   Often, this paper was messy, coated in the oil from workers' hands that moved from the heavy equipment to record measurements or notes on paper. Sometimes pages would be illegible by the end of the process when someone would eventually enter all of the information into a computer.
   "Literally, sometimes we would have a stack of paperwork that was 100-percent saturated with oil," said Scott Reeves, Dixie inventory manager.
   Today, computers replace the paper at each station of Dixie's fabrication bays. An employee will scan a bar code labeled on each piece into the computer. The computer determines the amount of time the employee spends on each process, who is working on it, and whether or not the measurements of the piece fit the plan requirements.
   The employee can also see the most up-to-date drawings of the plan and see exactly where every piece in the series is located in the shop. The computer will indicate which pieces are scrapped and if new pieces need to be started.
   Follow the flow of the pieces
   In the past, the assembly would be planned in an office away from where the parts are fabricated. It could take days for the office to recognize that a piece to a project was not moving along according to schedule.
   The system is so efficient that the company that developed the system, Dallas-based Tamlin Software Developers, is switching its focus to full-time development of systems similar to the one used at Dixie.
   The system is drawing interest from manufacturers around the country that, like Dixie, must keep a close rein on the assembly of many pieces, said Linda Poling, president of the 8-year-old software solutions company.
   "We have turned our company direction and all of our marketing to this," she said. "We decided what we wanted to be when we grew up."
   A participant in the design
   Dixie will draw royalty checks for each system sold.
   Bar coding systems have become more affordable in recent years, and in turn have become a popular option for manufacturers, Poling said. A draw to the bar coding is that it provides real-time information about every aspect of the assembly.
   Two years ago, managers from Dixie began a search for a way to integrate all of the facets of their operation into one cohesive system.
   By the beginning of 1998, they shared their vision of devising a system that would keep track of batches of parts even though the pieces might travel individually through the fabrication shop.
   The result was a computerized system that is driven by bar code recognition. By fall of 1998, Tamlin started installing the 38 computer monitors and a mile of cable throughout the shop.
   When the system was fully operational in March 1999, Dixie threw out the old system. By that time, the employees were used to entering the data on their computer screens, like the measurements and pressure tests from inspections.
   A data trail
   The system keeps close track of the labor hours that eventually determine how much Dixie will charge for a project. It also keeps track of inventory and satisfies the intricate documentation required for Dixie's ISO 9001 safety status. The finished product's pedigree can even be traced back to the mill, where the metal was forged to create the original form.
   "We know exactly who machined it, exactly what second of what day it was machined," Danos said.
   Dixie already is seeing gained efficiencies from the move to less paper.
   Now it is easier for the computer system to keep track of each order. If a piece doesn't make inspection, a person can tell from the scrap list which pieces need to be remade.
   "By going to the concept of a one-piece router where every part is independent, they can still move through the shop as a group as the schedule dictates, but if they want to break those up, its no big deal," Reeves said. "They read the serial numbers and they move on to the next step."




Business writer Andrea Jares can be reached at 886-3678 or by e-mail at jaresa@caller.com

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