Transcript:
Hi, my name is Peter Gadzinski and I work for a company called MaxScheduler. We’re starting a web series for manufacturers and printers about software challenges they face in their businesses. MaxScheduler is a scheduling software business focused on manufacturing and printing. We have 15 years of experience and we’ve helped companies schedule around 300 million tasks. We want to share our experiences. Myself, I’m a scheduling expert and a product manager.
This is the first chapter in our series and I wanted to lay some groundwork for the upcoming chapters. I wanted to start off with an evolution of manufacturing and printing companies and how they step through software systems as they start off their companies and get bigger. Say you’re starting from nothing, you start up a manufacturing facility or a print shop, you don’t have much money, you don’t have much business, you’re just getting the ball rolling. Probably the first system or software your going to purchase is an accounting package. Because the financial details about a business become hairy, pretty quickly. You want something to keep you in line. For example keep on top of your accounts payables, your accounts receivables, etc. You want to track all of this so when you hand stuff over to the accountant, everything is fine. Also more importantly an accounting system can help you keep on top of cash flow which is a business killer.
There are a couple other benefits of starting off with an accounting system is quite often they’re pretty affordable to get into. For a couple of hundred dollars you can buy a version of QuickBooks or a Sage product. Sage is another kind of umbrella of accounting systems. These systems quite often don’t just do financial details, they also have extra features. In some of the QuickBooks products, for example, there is inventory management, there is CRM, which is customer relationship management. You could put in work orders and the software supports, to a minimal extent, some of these functions.
As your company grows and you get more business, you may start looking at that accounting system and say, “Well, I need to get more out of it. I want to track more details within that accounting system.” This is where a lot of businesses get to a fork in the road. They start thinking, “Well perhaps I need to take my software systems to the next level.” I call the next level enterprise software. Here are some terms you’ve probably heard before, MRP, ERP, MIS, WMS, or Homegrown System. MRP stands for manufacturing resource planning. ERP is enterprise resource planning. MIS that is an umbrella for a lot of systems. WMS stands for warehouse managing systems. Homegrown is a system you build yourself.
In this series, I wanted to delve into some of these points. We actually spend a lot of time in the area of enterprise software with these chapters and I want to give you some insight or share our thoughts of what we’ve seen. I hope you enjoy our series. That’s the end of this chapter. Thank you for your time. If you have any comments, questions, or are interested in MaxScheduler, our scheduling software, please reach out to us through MaxScheduler.com. Have a good day.