Page 32 - 2021 CNC West April-May

The intuitive drag-and-drop touch screen interface of the Scheduling Board enables users to schedule and monitor shop order operations, represented as cards, within and between work centers represented as swim-columns
shipped via EstiTrack’s document management system. Visual Books is the name of Henning Software’s fully integrated Accounting System. Steve, VMP’s senior financial officer, uses Visual Books in his daily routine. “Henning Software Rocks,” describes Steve. “I know that isn’t very specific, but it does.” When pressed for a better answer “user friendly” and “intuitive” topped the descriptions. “We are nowhere near being power users,” continues Steve. “We probably just scratch the surface of the capabilities, but for us it just works and does exactly what we need it to. We rely on it for AR, AP as well as the estimating, inventory control and shop management features. We do not cut payroll checks from Visual Books, but you can. We track employee hours but then use an outside payroll service. Payroll is the only module we do
not use.”
Visual EstiTrack’s Touch Scheduling Board has
yet to be implemented at VMP, but Richard Henning, president of Henning Software thinks it is a great tool for companies like VMP who run a ton of parts on a shop full of machines. “The intuitive drag-and-drop touch screen interface of the Scheduling Board enables users to schedule and monitor shop order operations, represented as cards, within and between work centers represented as swim-columns,” describes Richard Henning. “The Touch Scheduling BoardTM is designed to emulate and replace the magnetic scheduling boards often found in shops. This scheduling tool is designed to be deployed on large touch- screen monitors on the shop floor and is fully integrated into Visual EstiTrackTM ERP. The Scheduling Board makes it easier for shop floor personnel to prioritize operations, view/set statuses, move operations from one work center to another and allow employees to clock in and out of shop order operations from the Scheduling Board.”
Henning Software holds annual user conferences to present enhancements they made to their product line and to get constructive feedback and recommendations from their customers. “VMP has attended and participated in many of our user conferences over the past 21 years,” says Rich Henning. By attending user conferences, Bob and his team have provided invaluable feedback and suggestions thus helping improve Visual EstiTrack’s capabilities. “Bob is more than a customer, he is a friend. Our 21-year relationship with VMP is a true partnership,” says Rich Henning. “We deeply appreciate our long-term and mutually rewarding relationship with VMP and look forward to working together for many years to come.”
Visual EstiTrack’s production monitoring screens and reports make it easy for our shop to keep track of how well shop order operations are running and em- ployees are performing. Efficiency reports keep track of and compare targeted gross and net pieces per hour to the actual pieces per hour to monitor shop pro- ductivity. Reports can be filter by shop order, part number, shift and employee so we can keep our finger on the pulse of our shop floor performance.
VMP can produce 250,000 parts a day and has millions of parts in inventory ready to ship to OEM and aftermarket customers.
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CNC WEST April/May 2021