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Software takes off at aircraft-tool shop

Nov. 10, 2005
With its old shop-management software, Magnavon Industries Inc. had to painstakingly navigate through nine steps, each of which involved that many separate screens, reports and approvals to cut a check or pay a bill.

Magnavon tracks its 450 to 600 job part numbers, controls its entire business from quoting to shipping and easily shares data using JobBOSS and e-Synergy software packages.

With its old shop-management software, Magnavon Industries Inc. had to painstakingly navigate through nine steps, each of which involved that many separate screens, reports and approvals to cut a check or pay a bill. In addition, the software, because it was basically for accounting, did not tie into the Placentia, Calif., shop's manufacturing operations, so it used another software package for that. To make matters worse, sharing data between the two systems was extremely difficult.

The shop, which designs and manufactures special tools for the aircraft industry, now tracks its 450 to 600 job part numbers, controls its entire business from quoting to shipping and easily shares data using JobBOSS and e-Synergy from Exact Software of Minneapolis.

JobBOSS shop-management software features the OfficeBoss performance-management module that incorporates balanced scorecard functionality. With this scorecard, business owners and key decision makers view leading business indicators in one place. There are predefined ready-to-use measurements, as well as the option of adding or customizing new measurements. Shops can also bring in non-JobBOSS data for measurement.

Three other components of OfficeBoss are Trend Analysis, Document Management and Outlook Integration. Trend Analysis lets shops identify and analyze long-term trends via weekly shop status; Document Management captures and organizes documents such as ISO procedures, company policies and certifications; and Outlook Integration allows scheduling and following through on actives, saving and publishing reports and e-mail actionitem notification.

According to Kevin Crump, CEO of Magnavon, the shop chose JobBOSS based on price, ease of use and its web readiness. In fact, incorporating JobBOSS led to adding e-Synergy, which seamlessly integrates with JobBOSS and lets the shop's employees complete tasks from home and the road.

As a web-based collaboration platform, e-Synergy unifies people, processes and knowledge for creating accurate, up-to-the-moment views of the shop's personnel, finance, workflow, documents and assets. Such views help in decision making, analysis, scenario planning and ongoing management. Because the platform integrates and consolidates corporate data into one database, all members of the value chain can view and modify information based on their access and roles within the system. "Internally, e-Synergy smoothes day-to-day workflow and solves product-management and other such problems," says Crump. www.exactsoftware.com/jobboss