ABI Role Call: Production
Updated: May 29, 2020
When it comes to Job Costing Analysis, it's natural to ask a lot of questions:
Are you charging enough for your products?
Are your estimates and quotes an accurate reflection of your costs and prices?
How can you increase revenue on future jobs?
Are some areas of your plant or certain product lines dragging you down?
Where should you focus your process improvement efforts?
These are all questions that can only be answered with a thorough knowledge of what’s happening on your shop floor. Unfortunately, due to the many systems that encompass your manufacturing processes, many ERP systems can only provide shop floor insight on a per-job basis, making it difficult to determine business decisions on a department, site, or company level. This dilemma is a major reason why companies are moving towards Analogyx BI.
Analogyx BI’s web-based platform allows users to compile data from multiple data sources across the shop floor, enabling the analysis of manufacturing processes from the company level down to individual product jobs.
As you can see in the video above, Analogyx BI has a complete set of tools which provide insight into the Production and Job Management areas of your company.
Today, we’ll take a look at Analogyx BI’s ability to provide Job Costing Analysis.
At the job level, Job Costing is an essential tool for tracing specific costs to individual jobs and examining them to see if the costs can be reduced in later jobs. Meanwhile, analyzing Job Costs on higher levels provides a powerful tool for process improvement, supply chain management, sales growth, and increased profits.
We’ll start by looking at Analogyx BI’s ability to provide a corporate-wide view. The first thing we see as our dashboard opens is the digital readout of our total estimated costs versus actual costs for the time period displayed.
Scrolling down, we then see our data broken down into Job Costs by Company (if we’re multi-company), Job Costs by Plant (if we’re multi-plant), and Job Costs by Customer.
To take this further, we can go down to the Detail Level and get a corporate overview of Job Cost by Part Class, Part Group, Part Number, Description, Type and even the Job Number.
So now that we’ve seen the higher Corporate Level view, let’s take a look at Analogyx BI’s ability to perform a Root Cause Analysis, down to the Job Level.
We start by looking for our biggest difference. Thanks to Analogyx BI's user-friendly tools, we can easily turn off any parameters that may be confusing to get a clearer picture. (Watch the video above for a more in-depth view of this feature.)
We now see that our biggest cost difference occurred in December of 2019, just over $2,000. Using our Time Range Filter to enter a custom date, let’s go back in time to the period we wish to investigate.
We now see our data narrowed down to only the month of December 2019, as reflected in our digital readouts and at our Company, Plant, and Customer Levels.
As we can now see, our UKB company made up the majority of our $2,000 difference, so we’ll just click on UKB company to drill down further.
Here, we see that of the three plants contained within the UKB company, the Hagans company really was the majority of the cost difference. By clicking on the Hagans plant, we can now go down to see that Hall associates was the customer responsible for that delta.
Maintaining our filter of filtering down to Plant and Customer level, we can now go to the Detail Level to go even deeper. And, if you ever need to remember what filters are applied, we can always look at our filter widgets, which are displayed on each chart. Here, we see our time range period for December 1st through 31st of 2019, our company is UKB, and we’re filtering on just the Hagan site. We can clearly see which product group and part class are involved.
Scrolling down, we now see the specific Part Number that is driving the delta, as well as its Description. And with just these few clicks of the mouse, we are able to determine the two jobs at the root of our problem.
If we want to drill down even further, we can now use these Job Numbers to continue our root-cause analysis utilizing Analogyx BI's Job Assembly, Job Material, and/or Job Summary dashboards.
Job Cost Analysis from Corporate Level down to Job Level — another reason why companies are choosing Analogyx BI to drive their business success forward. Join Analogyx BI, and get visual.
Interested in Analogyx BI? Click here for a free demo, and get visual!
Other videos in our ABI Role Call series: