LIVE : Discussion about our LEx ERP Software!

hello everybody i hope you can hear me well i'm actually really excited for today's live stream because we've got a little bit of some new gear some lighting it's actually mostly stuff that we already owned but we got our internet connection beefed up i got a new background canvas poster made so i'm pretty excited about this [Music] it will be available for replay and i'll definitely answer questions um throughout if i can and towards the end but today i want to talk about lex uh the software that we built that really has become the glue of running saunders machine works i'm going to switch over i've got some like images and slides that i think will help kind of carry us through this so let's see if i do this perfect hopefully everybody can see uh and hear me just fine and we've got the slides up now so this trust me this is not just a powerpoint but i wanted a way to kind of capture some of the key moments because frankly i'm incredibly proud of what we've built with lex the team here has done a great job it's called lex because alex has been the one here that's done a lot of the heavy lifting and we kind of jokingly called it light erp and then x because we're like who knows what else this is going to do but really super cool and i was thinking about what started all this and it was this title uh for a while i was the only person that could order raw material and that's super not sustainable as a small business by way of background in case you only know us from the nyccnc youtube what i spend most of my time doing is helping run saunders machine works our primary product is fixture plates we also have the modvice system and about 30 other accessories or products that go along with it but here's a crazy thing between all the different makes models sizes and materials of fixture plates plus all the modvice versions and sub components screws fasteners accessories we have over 1500 inventoried items we're still a super small business as well you know we have far fewer than 10 employees about five to six full-time and we've always been super active with interns and i kind of can't believe it now that we've built lex i don't know how we even did what we did so long without it so i want to show more about how it works for us but hopefully the takeaway for everyone here will be to consider what to look for and how you can start working on stuff now that can help you kind of set yourself up for success and we i wouldn't call it a mistake but we made one significant change to lex about a month ago which is actually pretty cool i'll get to that in a minute so this is the old way i used to order material if you're a manufacturing entrepreneur or your job shop i'm guessing you've done the same thing i had notepad files or excel files this is kind of an old snippet of the modvice bill of materials uh and in some respects there's nothing wrong with this it's it's not necessarily a terrible way to do it i was pretty judicious about getting the details right on this and one of the things that we improved on part way through on this was having the yellow section down here where i would highlight stuff i needed to include in the rfq or purchase order so for raw material we found cut tolerances and details about how we wanted that material to be ordered how to be cut to show up really really helped so um i didn't deliberately know it at a time but this is the kind of start of a process of how to uh get stuff ordered um but it was still not good we sat down and we thought wait me here we need to make it way easier to buy stuff and it's a concept that i think i first heard from jay pearson purchasing versus procurement switch back over here to live stream so purchasing is just buying stuff screws fasteners raw material if it's on autopilot you buy it once you're gonna buy it again you should create a process around that totally different mentality and way of thinking about it than procurement which may be like buying a new machine or something that's much more capital in nature or requires a lot more thinking so we wanted to go about creating a process for how to do this we sat down and we looked at pain points so first pain point i was the only one who could buy raw material that's like a huge issue if i was out of the shop or if i was busy or what vacation whatever not good but it's really way worse than that people would be asking have you ordered it has it been ordered no one would know you're you're not sure you would spend time asking i usually wouldn't know the answer so we would have to i'd have to go look it up um just not good then it gets worse when is it going to arrive sometimes i had ordered it but it hadn't arrived or we didn't think it had arrived and i'd have to go look up that or have to go track it down uh and then even worse there were times where we had ordered it we didn't know where it was in the shop and i think a couple of times we had thought we were running out reordered only to realize that we had already reordered and there was a second batch of material now since we're a product-based company having an extra batch of material it's not the end of the world but still this is not you know excelling at business this is not good and i wanted to fix that and lastly as the guy buying the material it's super helpful to know what did we pay less time uh if you guys have followed the metals market and frankly all markets you know look at mcmaster pricing the prices have changed a lot sometimes you don't control that but nevertheless it's really good to be able to immediately have that data around so um before we decided to build lex we actually didn't really mean to even build lex could somebody chime in i see a comment hello from australia i just want to make sure we're so good on the live stream quality here um we we really didn't want to i had no interest in building an erp system we are not software developers um period so and i'm happy to go more into this if folks want to hear it we really looked hard at odoo it's it's an open source erp but it is usually sold and you pay for it through the accompany odoo that is affiliated with the open source odoo and it was great until we got into the weeds and we had quite a few meetings with them on this and basically they were going to require customization where uh and this is a one-year-old information now but if we had to have them do 12 hours of custom programming it was a pretty expensive rate quite a few hundred dollars per hour that was then billed either every month or every year repeatedly just to keep all of our systems up to date so there was not there wasn't at the time good integration with our e-commerce shopify i wasn't interested in letting oh do br ecommerce and it's kind of the overall theme of like man this is just such a one-size-fits-all and it's expensive and on top of expensive they're feeding us um on i don't want to build a business right now that's obligating itself to lots of customization fees in perpetuity um but i still don't want to write odoo off long term for us or others and ryan over at seneca woodworking has become a pretty good friend they are in the process of implementing odoo um i think they're going to share more on it i'd like to go film a tour at their place and talk about his experience with it so more to come on that um there were two other options that kind of struck out in our research netsuite and business one i think these are oracle and sap if i recall simply put we weren't ready they say that these are for small businesses but you know the definition of a small business includes employees up to dozens or hundreds of employees we're we're still a micro business so netsuite in business one were uh looking at having consultants come in five figure you know meaning 10 000 plus implementation plans like they're meeting with teams of people and i was just like okay well not us right now um and then there are actually a number of um i would say pretty decent erp systems for job shops pro shops e2 job boss come to mind but we're not a job shop and kind of just irked me like they didn't have public pricing and it kind of felt the same way where it's like what is this what am i buying here um and i also just didn't love the fact that we would be building the backbone the cornerstone of this business if it went well on a third-party subscription service where i'm at their whims subscriptions are kind of hard to avoid these days on some things but man erps i just didn't love it but also we aren't a job shop i've seen folks that are running job shops and are using some of the softwares and it's phenomenal so more power to them it's also worth noting you can talk about what an erp really is technically it stands for enterprise resource planning but it's a little bit of a catch-all phrase where sometimes it like a true erp system i remember seeing this at haas they use i think sap it literally it's really cool it handles everything like it handles hr accounting invoicing all the way down to um to inventory management and like the barcodes on indicators that they use for asset tracking everything and that whole company runs through a true erp system a lot of the times when i see job shop type erp systems it really is more of like a material order planning workflow thing so it's not necessarily going to handle ecommerce or the front end of marketing engines versus say software like odoo that is a true erp software they have a option to do email marketing campaigns and to host your e-commerce or your website so just worth noting how kind of crazy deep you can get on these things let's see here so the diy versions of some form of erp software look start with excel that was the key for us to start building at least the data set again i think that's pretty obvious um and then asana and air table i've got two little slides coming up here to talk about those i think they're great stepping stones and they may actually be fairly sustainable for folks ultimately for us we had built our s tool system that tracks how we keep our cutting tools organized in a pretty simple sql database with a php wordpress kind of front end we're not software developers this works but um it's it's hacky i guess you could say again we have some in-house knowledge on that but upwork is a great site john grimsm and i've talked a lot about this on the business of machining podcasts do not hesitate to hire an upwork engineer i think john's done things where he's had for a relatively small sum of money people build custom code that helps them integrate things run run updates interface with fanuc controls with shopify with lottery generator numbers uh really pretty cool stuff so asana is is for sure worth noting we use asana still to this day although not for the portion here that we've since pushed into lex but we used to let lex asana handle basically our our job scheduling for priority and how we send things to cert different machines and again as a way of communicating so it doesn't have to ask grant or julie doesn't have to ask garrett where that plate is or when it's going to be done and if a customer calls i can log in and see what's going on with it asana is free i use it for organizing video projects and stuff like that so definitely check it out i think it's fairly similar to trello i think maybe monday or jira or other software i hear about in this space but pretty cool stuff and then airtable is actually a really interesting one what's interesting is it's a proper database software super easy to use lots of tutorials it's either free or freemium meaning it's free until you need a bunch of users or more functionality it supports some amount of web front end so you can actually have like customers push information into your air table database and so forth and then the key is they offer templates like this one i just looked up before this video it's literally an inventory template so you can start with that and customize it uh on your own so definitely look into that basically i'm discouraging anybody from actually trying to build an erp system until you think you're ready for it um so but let's talk about that so what is lex um and how did it start what we knew is that we needed a way to classify stuff so this started back when we were just ordering using lex to order material and we decided a numbers would be an individual item um so like buying a raw piece of material that gets later machined into a mod vise the b number would be what that is after it's been machined so uh modvice soft jaw starts as a chunk of aluminum as an a number that's what we order from our aluminum supplier and then when we machine it it gets finished as a b number things become a c number which is a sub assembly that then go into an s number which is a final product so with rare exception for everything that we have as an s number means it's something that we can literally pick up and drop in a box to send to a customer we then added tease numbers for like tooling the supplies because we use lex to buy end mills and paper towels and then o for outside service like sending stuff out to get anodized so how does lex work at its core if we need modvice soft draw material actually this is now out of date but i wanted to put this in uh here because this is how we use lex for almost a year if we needed a modvice raw material the reason we would know that was because whoever was running those saw that we hit a kanban reorder trigger or we just knew come back to that weakness you would then either scan with a barcode or usually we just typed in that probably an a number and that would then push that item into an order cube for raw material it would be an rfq lex lets us send a raw material out to multiple people to get quotes on it which is great if it was something like a screw that we buy from a vendor it would just go straight to a po but in an order queue me or julie or somebody else would then periodically look through the order queue and decide when we wanted to push it that process could be automated but we've to this day not done it because it doesn't take any time and we like that human touch of looking at what needs ordered what we did do is create an alert where if something sits in the order queue for longer than a few days i think it lets me know or somebody else knows that way we don't again let things sit in the order queue without getting ordered what's great is lex closes the loop so once it gets ordered it goes into an inbound it goes into an inbound status so i know to be waiting for it and oops and then once it comes in i'm trying to switch my view here guys sorry once it comes in i'm able to then or anybody frankly is able to then tag it in so that's part of the key if we order 100 pieces of material it lists as inbound we can see what we're waiting for when it comes in we scan it in the po that we sent to the company has our elects number on it so it makes it really easy to look at what is coming in and then i embedded a little video here showing this is me manually printing a label but when we're checking stuff in when you confirm that you've received it it gives you the option to go ahead and print the label right away so this is an s number label for a mod vice if you've bought a mod advice from us you've probably seen this label on your box but these exist for a b's c's etc and the picture on the right there just shows the best way we found for raw material is we just put that label on a scrap piece of wood that works great for big pallets of like fixture plate material for smaller stuff that comes in boxes we put it on the cardboard box or the red bin that we buy from uline just again to keep things labeled side note we have location tracking in lex we actually turned it off we weren't using it we haven't had an issue of knowing where stuff is but we were always thinking about how you make sure that this is scalable where if you have a big enough place or you know one person puts something away the other person's not going to know where it is necessarily so that functionality is there let's hear what's next okay so this is actually really cool uh this was a huge change um until about a month ago lex was what i call a dumb system uh it did what we told it to or we told it what to do so uh in that example with a mod vice if we ran out of modvice top jaw material it was up on ed or grant or somebody to realize we were low on that and type in that number we started thinking about trying to automate some of that and we realized the only way to do this is to go all in so for the last month lex is fully autonomous so what i mean by that is if you go on our website right now and you buy a mod vice it will shopify will sell you one it will then deprecate or reduce the value of modvice inventories in shopify by one and then the shopify api will push that into lex lex will then deprecate the s value by one as well as all of the sub assemblies so the top jaws the bases the screws the washers the everything the box is even and if those sub assemblies hit trigger quantities it will automatically generate the appropriate action so if it's for screws it'll generate a po if it's for things we need machined it will generate a work order if it's the for things that we need quoted it'll generate an rfq and it cascades or flows down so if those work order was to make something and to make it we need a material but to make it with the material we need to order more material it orders or puts that into the order queue which has been absolutely awesome the first day we turned this on there were definitely some hiccups but it was absolutely the way to go because lex now has intelligence over everything it knows how many screws that we have in stock how many cardboard boxes we have in how much material we have in and so forth switch back here sorry to the uh cool so what's next um john grims and i uh do our podcast every week and he mentioned something this morning this podcast will air this friday he mentioned something that i love what gets measured gets managed this is not why we originally made lex it was something i had sort of thought of but blex lets us manage things better without ever feeling like we're managing stuff because we now know everything case in point the next bullet point lex shows us trailing sales and our buying history when we went when we went full nuts a month ago with the api integration from shopify uh which was not that difficult uh shopify has a great and well documented api we pull in trailing sales so as an example i needed to reorder material for one of our fixture plates for the hobby machines and i was like i wonder if we should buy 30 pieces of it and right there in that same window was our trailing 90 i think it was trailing three months sale so that immediately told me how much material we or how much we've sold which helps me make a better educated decision on how much we should buy we also have an issue right now where when we hit work order triggers we it's not totally clear what should be made first so what we thought about we haven't implemented this yet but i think it's actually pretty simple is a kind of an urgency metric which would be uh trailing sales divided by quantity on hand or something like that because um we may hit trigger points but depending on how many we've been selling tells tells us maybe how more much more important that is um and then lastly i i love lex i love how intelligent it is but i'm also a big fan of the human touch so what we've done is started to look at things like making sure lex can still let us know when we need to know so if we hit quantity zero on something we think that's a big deal we've really tried to build saunders machine works on one of the key pillars of having stuff ready to ship and so if you buy a vf2 plate or a tormach 1100 plate um our website shows if we have it in stock hopefully we do have it stock and we get it shipped pretty quick if we run out of stock we want to know and i don't just want that data to get lost in the noise especially if it's something that we sell a lot of so what we have the idea of is a simple email like an intelligent email not just a generic report but an email from lex to me or to juilliard to ed saying hey ed we are currently out of steel vf2 plates and we sold this many over the last uh three weeks that lets us come in with that human element and decide uh we should figure out why that happened and what we need to do to get that made um next up it was a easy and natural extension to include maintenance in lex again i wanted to build a process around this there's stuff that we wanted to do uh from a maintenance standpoint where i was putting it in a personal calendar or asking other folks to do it um super easy to do this also could be done again easily in things like air table where every month or week or even every year you know i work for or grant or ed or garrett works for lex it just tells us hey every year we need to drain the hot water heater or change the filters on the rooftop air conditioner or lube lube the draw bars and so forth so makes it just wonderfully easy i think that's all i got so um what kind of questions that you have oh i'm i'm chiming back in on the comments now that i'm here it's always hard to read while you're while you're talking and presenting um first of all i love this guys i'm super excited about the uh the new um uh internet live streaming here i'm gonna reset my camera real quick because otherwise it will shut off on its own right back here you'll probably get the blue bars um but i'm happy to stick around here for a few more minutes to see um what kind of questions you guys have ryan winter's mentioning what gets measured gets managed is he thinks from peter drucker book called the effective executive like butter is mentioning that they hit their automation limit pretty quickly with air table but very happy with what you made and feels like you're only scratching the surface for sure i've seen some air table stuff done that blew my mind around organizing like cutting tools and tickets and job queries and so forth um yeah john john uh excuse me if i mispronounced this rantaletta mentioned had two client ceos fired because erps ran over budgets bake your own or change the business to fit do not customize purchase erps what i've heard from like friends that work for big corporations is that um that's what they do though like if you're a if you're a company that's 50 or 200 employees and you hire an sap to consult to come in it's like a year-long process of them integrating customizing training and so forth um what is lex programmed in so the data is in the sql database and then we just use kind of a combination of basically the wordpress front end that uses php to talk to the between the two um matt asks um do you have any long-term goals to potentially resell x so we've gotten this question um the direct short answer is no what we want to do is share what we've learned to encourage folks to kind of do this and roll this on their own lex has meant for us both in that it's kind of for fixture plates and how we run saunders but honestly way more importantly we're not software developers i was talking about what it would take to kind of even start turning some of this over and this is you know it's hosted on a local server and it's no we're not software developers so um we don't have a business case or plan around how we would even go about doing that and for sure we're focused on building our fixture plate business so that's the the no kind of no bs answer but there seems to be a ton of interest around this sort of topic so i want to encourage folks like for us it just started with buying raw material i heard i think it was also jay pearson talked about having just a simple email thing built where he has the products he needs to buy all of the information is saved in a template format with the specs and so forth and when he needs more material it just sends off an email that's like erp lite and i love it and you'll end up building that into something else um and look we we have thought about what lex doesn't do you know it doesn't tie into our accounting um that's a potentially big problem because for example we would end up paying an invoice even if something didn't get delivered um and so part of me thinks hey maybe one day we end up just porting lex over to a real erp system and we'll be way better off and i'd be willing to spend the time and money because now we know what we want um see i'm reading through some comments here do you saw the staff member on lex full time and how much upkeep um we have oh sorry my lights went out here um we have kind of part time if we will and again you got to use sites like upwork when you get stuck or need help on stuff but no it's not a full-time thing right now chris k asks thanks for the presentation are the processes you subscribed hard-coded in lecture do you have a functionality configure oh so we definitely have a functionality so in lex we can just go in and manage these so i can add a new maintenance task of every week to take the trash out and i can change who that gets emailed to how often it's done and so forth third-party erp or pdm systems are so frustrating it gets super expensive special functionality yeah again that's what i've heard i remember touring snh machine gosh probably three or four years ago that job shot down in la they had built their own again they don't think they necessarily meant it to be a full-blown erp system it was more of a reporting and data system and i'm pretty sure it was apple's filemaker pro and i've heard these little nuggets about how folks have built used built custom built software to kind of help them do what they do and that was kind of what made me realize oh let's do this and i actually think i've neglected to mention in this whole video we only built lex as a proof of concept to show the actual erp companies like business one or do what we wanted it to do that's what i had alex start with was i was like let's just see if we can get this working to help us know what we really want and literally we've never looked back um how are you quoting non-standard products uh are you using custom software utility so for custom fixture plates yeah it's actually still kind of a excel or google sheets process we've built some processes around um how we come up with that quote and how we have the customer sign off on drawings and then as soon as it goes from a quote to an order it gets moved into lex okay hunter k has a great question not an erp question actually i think it is do you do you feel an inventory management system is overkill for small single person hobby job shops um i mean if it's just you and you're not doing a lot meaning selling a product and so forth it might be overkill but as soon as you need to start reordering stuff or tracking stuff you know one of the things that we have the functionality to do in lex but we haven't done is all of our toolbox toolboxes can kind of get moved into lex so when we have a new intern or employee start and they're looking for a draw file they just search draw file and it tells them it's in the black husky toolbox drawer 3. we're not going crazy with digital toolboxes but you know our files haven't moved from the toolbox drawer in six years but i don't want to have somebody else always feel like they've got to ask somebody else where every little thing is and so looking at how you can build really intelligent systems as a solopreneur to help you efficiently reorder stuff track it you know sending out quotes i want to know if someone didn't get back to me by having lex tell me not by thinking and trying to track in my head oh man did that guy get back to me on that quote uh andrew mentions using used odoo was overkill used google app maker to give us a front-end gui and pull data in from google sheets that's awesome i didn't even know what about google app maker but something like that that can act as a front end to google sheets sounds great and potentially kind of like the air table solution i was mentioning oh app makeover's app maker is no longer supported but there's another third party company offering the same thing and andrew would you mention who that third party is if you don't mind um chris byrd asks do you use it for tracking carbide emails and inserts time used on the item we do not we use it to buy cutting tools from some of our vendors not everybody some places we actually still buy through just the website but no lex is not doing what i would consider statistical stuff on how long things take to make them or carbide usage studies it could we're kind of backed up on lex functionality so not on our radar right now app sheets is what it's called i tend to not scroll back up too much folks so if you asked a question that i didn't get to for sure chime back in um yeah chris we do use it on well um we aren't really using it on end mills so like if we buy 10 drills um we're not having lex not that we don't have the workflow right now where folks are like scanning to um to reorder another drill everyone just handles that here on their own that that works and will work for quite a while what we did think about with lex is we use a sandvik insert drill for drill most to drill most of the holes on our fixture plates and that um insert drill soft body does not last forever i think we replace it like every 15 or 20 insert changes which no one remembers that lex has the functionality we're not using it right now to where we have a barcode on the machine and every time you switch the drill insert out you just scan that barcode and it keeps tracking the back end and then it will tell you hey you just hit 15 insert changes go ahead and get a new replace that soft body um oh jason's asking do you have any plans to incorporate quality of parts in deluxe yes lex actually handles all of our qc now so um when we finish a fixture plate that's now created from a work order that work order gets moved into quality control so the quality control stuff is in lex and that's in a digital format so the big thing for us like checking the parallelism of the plate that's digitally stored it can be tracked over time and it's way better than paper sheets plus obviously we can search it we can tie it to work order numbers or shopify order numbers any advice if somebody wanted to start a company doing software for shops you know for us it's kind of like fixture plates i was looking back to uh my first tag in new york city and i saw a fixture plate and i was like that makes sense and i bought it um you know kind of build and do what you use and love um you know you could probably make an argument that it could potentially be more profitable for us to stop doing everything we're here at saunders and go turn ourselves into a software company for something like lex i don't want to do that i like making stuff and focus on this business but um get smart on it and and go do it would be the answer there i think there probably is a fair amount of room for disruption do pos or emails get automatically generated and sent when your inventory is low and how do you manage to change in pricing so pos are not totally automatically done they could be we have them we don't have that feature turned on at the moment because it's so easy for us to go look through what needs ordered and i like that human element but work orders and the same thing actually work orders get automatically created but then they get moved into a kind of purgatory status where we go through and manually just make sure that's all correct we'll move on from that soon but what i don't want to do is accidentally have somebody make 200 of something that we didn't really need i tell you it's awesome we've seen folks on instagram being like we're waking up at 5 a.m i don't know where you are if it's 5 a.m to watch this but it's it's kind of blown us away at how much interest there is on this so um you mentioned how this would scale down how would it do scaling up for larger business i think lex would scale up fairly well there's definitely some programming limitations that are beyond our ability with multiple users or there's a couple weird bugs where if we refresh something it could duplicate the duplicate the task which we don't want um i think for me the biggest um hiccup is the accounting side of things you know for companies that are ordering literally you know a manufacturing company that's ordering potentially thousands or tens of thousands of dollars of material or stuff per week you really want the accounting system tied into your erp system that way an invoice isn't able to be paid until it's marked as received or something like that um so in lex could kind of sort of tie into that but for sure the businesses that i've seen that kind of from the ground up use something like sap all that's the same system again it's kind of kind of cool but kind of crazy to me to think that the same software handles marketing as hr and payroll and asset inventory and so forth tim mentions i followed you from the beginning election is great missing the accounting is a big hole yeah i hear you um we also like our zero accounting software right now so um give it a look if you need a full erp uh which tormach is using for this tim which which erp were you mentioning that that you're referring to and that or tormach's using if sap were cheaper would you have considered them so the answer is no for two reasons one my understanding is sap is generally sold through like a consultant or a reseller and that process looked like it was going to be again a team of people and you know ten thousand dollars plus for an implementation package and we just wanted to start building lex to order aluminum i got tired of copying and pasting things out of a cell there's a big disconnect um where we are now with it i could have a very intelligent conversation with somebody and get a much more good answer of what we need it to do but again lex is working pretty well for us um accumatica is the erp that tim was referring to that tormach uses um i'm going to wrap up here in the next two minutes but get your questions in if you have questions in the other thing i'll throw out um i want to do some more videos talking about the business side and the operation side of of saunders machine works and in hopes that it kind of helps answer and tackle subject matters for other folks out there that are running shops the next one that i have on mine is um thinking about preparing for a downturn and one of the reasons i like that idea is that no one's expecting a downturn i know everyone's kind of on edge with covid but it's been such a strong year year and a half and 12 year run i think it's one of those like okay let's be counterintuitive and let's think about holy cow what happens if things slow down a little or maybe a lot what are we literally doing to make sure i want to be here for a long time doing this has anybody here used fulcrum erp asks henry holsters if anybody has chime in and then chris asks are you familiar with microsoft power automate and it's robotic process automation great for stitching together processes across software platforms so that's super cool um i kind of acknowledge i'm at that age where i'm just not as in the loop on stuff as i wish i was there are these um app companies as well not zoomers something like that which can there these like widget apps that you pay for and they can connect uh asana to if this then that or shopify to google sheets or something um maybe that's part of what power automate is so rock on that's awesome um i'm i'm not in the loop on it jake asks for some proven cut recipes uh shoot a recipe request over where vince has been crushing it on adding recipes and so forth so let him know what you're looking for like butter and and henry you guys are saying fulcrum was great but too much money zapier thank you any you guys mind sharing what it costs that's one of the things i love trying to share the information on is what do these things cost because man these um sites that don't tell you anything uh even even the job shop erp systems it's like a black box of what the subscriptions look like we do have a metric version and of the quarter inch mod vise and yes we ship all over the world i don't think we have a metric version of the inch right now but for sure on the radar okay i'm not seeing other questions trickle in so if you guys want to see more on lex or other business topics for sure reach out uh let us know um netsuite costs 60 000 for a company plus monthly maintenance yeah that's crazy um yeah chris i was referring to the hobby mod advice right there um oh now the questions are coming in do we plan on discussing additive machining um we do 3d printing at just the basic fdm level i don't think i have a lot to add there other than we've found a ton of good uses for 3d printing in a machine shop but i love seeing the laser sintering machines and where that's going fulcrum is priced in tiers based on your size with recurring monthly fees for integration sounds pretty much like the normal answer fulcrum is going to start at 500 per month plus thousands in integration yeah that's what i'm hearing from others uh r3vo i'm currently looking for a way to improve file management on our servers and local pcs they tend to get cluttered and we're having trouble finding files look into a pdm system the one i absolutely seem to hear the most about is autodesk's vault but i don't know a ton about pdm so i am i can't comment more jake for sure reach out to vince though i'm not going to um military recipes just let us know what kind of machine you're looking for on more specifics on tooling and so forth would i consider designing and selling my own line of desktop machines maybe in another era i'd be lying if i said i hadn't thought about it but it is incredibly uh tall order to completely build design and bring to market a cnc machine building the machine isn't necessarily the craziest hard thing but building your workflow in a company around design through selling and support is is not so um for a job shop would you suggest learning how to build an air table for an erp or go something like e2 four person laser shop put in here dude absolutely build an air table i bet you in a weekend you'd be blown away at how much progress you can make build it find out what you don't like hire an upwork person to fix that stuff outgrow it and then when you outgrow it go go with e2 data proto mentions that they use autodesk vault for document management and it works great yeah erp systems kind of like pdm's you always tend to hear the negative stuff people complaining and training and cost but vault i've actually heard mostly decent things about it so if you're not familiar with pdms go watch some youtube videos on autodesk vault otherwise i am going to call it a day as always folks seriously i'm incredibly grateful i love what i get to do i mentioned it to john grimsmill i've kind of got this renewed sense of energy around what we're doing here it's super fun i'm happy we've got this live stream set up with higher internet speed so that we can stream with good quality um so let me know what you guys want to see on business topics um and operations type stuff and we'll keep this going otherwise take care see you soon

Channel: NYC CNC

Views: 7,432

Rating: 4.7209301 out of 5

Keywords: tormach, fusion 360, how to, cnc, machine shop, nyc cnc, DIY, machining, milling, CAD, cnc machining, cnc milling, learn cnc, john saunders, manufacturing entrepreneurship, provencut, CAM toolpaths, workholding techniques, fixturing, saunders machine works, fixture plates, modular workholding

Id: yHi-BOL_mDM

Length: 43min 10sec (2590 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 08 2021