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Simplify Your Workflow with a Few Easy Clicks of Logic by Shivie Dhillon, PowderSoft
The powder coating industry is thriving today, thanks in part to two very different developments that took place around the same time, more than 40 years ago. One was the ecology movement, and the other was new equipment application techniques that made the powder coating process viable for production applications. Now we are at another crossroads; computerized technology is providing opportunities to streamline the production process and create efficiencies that weren’t previously so readily achievable. In an industry where attention to detail is foremost and where time management can dramatically affect dollars and cents, this latest development provides real quality control benefits and significant investment returns. I am talking about work flow software designed by powder coating professionals specifically for our industry. A software program of this type needs to allow those in the work flow process to work in a style and at a pace that is comfortable to them. It needs to be virtually seamless, with almost no learning curve. And it needs to set up easy-to-navigate fields that reduce or even eliminate errors and redundancies while taking you, step-by-step, through the entire workflow process. But a system that moves you from point A to point Z is not enough. It has to be logical; it has to ask the right questions or solicit responses at the appropriate time during the production process. I’m talking about simple, yet critical aspects about the job…things like the color of the powder to be used, what spray nozzle is required, the oven temperature, whether it needs to be sandblasted. If the system asks about the powder color at the appropriate time, for instance, this gives you enough warning to check your inventory before it becomes a time-consuming problem. It’s also true, of course, that you don’t need to know everything up front in production. Rather, you want to have certain elements available to you as you need them. That’s why, when we developed a workflow software program for the industry, we made sure that the questions and reminders were provided in a logical sequence. This doesn’t mean that you have to follow a rigid production course standardized by the software. On the contrary, we all have our comfort levels about the way we like to work. So the answer is a software program that gives you the ability to go wherever you want to go by opening up the windows and various fields that you need, according to your own production road map. If your powder coating business is anything like mine, you often have people asking questions about past jobs as a reference for one that they are presently processing. That’s why no quality software program is complete without also serving as a comprehensive resource library, where everything relevant to each job is resident in the system and stored for you or your assistants to review. That way, if the manager of the project isn’t there for some reason, progress is never impeded. You can even attach e-mails to the file, for a complete record of all related correspondences. At PowderSoft, my intent has always been to maintain the highest standards within the industry and to provide solutions that make it easier for all of us to be successful. That’s why, in the future, I’d like to share some other important things I discovered while trying to perfect a logical system for improved workflow.
Note: Shivie Dhillon, president of PowderSoft, the manufacturer of Traction-V2 powder coating workflow software, is also co-owner of Sundial Powder Coatings, of Sun Valley, California. Sundial is an industry leader offering a variety of innovations, from a 7-stage, stainless steel di-ionized water pretreatment system to the respected Six Sigma approach to quality control.
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