Graham stamping began with a DOS-based front office computer program that kept track of receiving, work inprocess, finished goods and shipping and bill of lading documents. Inventory, blanket orders, and raw materials also went through the system.
Numerous pieces of handwritten information and documentation from the shop floor needed to be hand-entered, checked, and modified to reflect the orders and raw materials present in the system. Besides the manual data transcription, the system required constant monitoring by knowledgeable, watchful eyes. Those belonged to the tireless team of Patty McGranahan, materials manager, and Nancy Kefurt, shipping clerk/secretary.
In 1999, Graham Stamping installed a system to collect data from the production floor; four terminals with keyboards and two line displays, connected to barcode printers. The terminals were controlled by a single PC located in Nancy’s office.
However, the two systems had no interface to each other. The data collected from the shop floor system was manually exported to MS Excel several times per day and used to modify data in the front office system. The data collected from the shop floor was then modified to reflect the new information present in the front office system since the last update. Although all the data from both systems was in electronic form, Patty and Nancy’s workload did not diminish.
Graham Stamping needed a single unified system that could take in both front office and production floor data, integrate and make changes instantly, without sacrificing visibility to Patty and Nancy. They needed to know when circumstances changed so they could quickly respond to their customers’ needs.
The authors of the DOS system were contacted to see if they could upgrade their system to accomplish this, but the project was out of their scope and far beyond the budgetary requirements for Graham Stamping.
Graham Stamping Company was founded in 1949 and specializes in progressive and compound die technology and supplies drawn, formed and flat application stampings to the automotive, construction and mining industries.
