Why do you need ERP Software for the Window and Door Manufacturing industry?

In today’s customer-centric experience economy, meeting every customer’s unique requirements and keeping a profit is hard. Customers need products faster and cheaper and have personal preferences. To meet the ever-changing market, you need to build products based on customer profiles and requirements and adhere to regulatory compliance to fulfill the products. The OpenJanela Software helps Window and Door manufacturers build better, faster, and cheaper products and manage the product’s life cycle better than other products. We have worked in the Window and Door Manufacturing industry for so long. We have created formulas and product templates for Windows and Doors. You do not have to manually draw pics of the product. This makes it easier for you to create a production report for the customer’s specifications and requirements provided in the Quote. OpenJanela Software gives the power of ERP software coupled with Quoting Software in a single application.

To build customer-centric configured products, OpenJanela Software uses mass customization technology to offer tailored products to end customers at the cost of mass production [1]. According to Anderson, Mass customization is ‘the ability to design and manufacture customized products at mass production efficiency and speed’ [2]. Nowadays, it has become a common practice for manufacturers to move from traditional make to stock and make to deliver to Mass Customization.

OpenJanela Software uses Mass Customization to pull the customer’s needs and behaviors in the design process. This is to develop the intelligence to design products to properly meet their expectations.

Key Benefits

• Sell through a Dealer Network:
  1. Your dealer can sell more products using the Online Dealer Software.
  2. Online Window and Door Configuration Tools – Help Dealers choose your standard design and enable them to Configure and Quote complex designs.
  3. Platform to collaborate effectively with customers for difficult-to-quote projects or Special pricing situations.
  4. Convert the approved quote to Sales Order with one click.
• Online Lead Acquisition:
  1. Generate leads for Business to Business (B2B) and Business to Customer (B2C) scenarios with a smart lead-building wizard.
  2. Use the Online B2C visual Configure Price Quote (CPQ) Window and Door design tool to convert website visitors to Actual Qualified leads.
  3. With Smart Assist, identify and prevent spending your Sales time on Cold Leads.
  4. Give context and insights needed to craft effective customer interactions by providing smart talking points.
  5. Book Sales Appointments, record communications, and follow-up tasks with Customers.
  6. Give a better user experience to your customers with a great level of personalization.
  7. Connect the XXX Software with your existing solution if needed for Sales Optimization.
  8. With AI-powered Storefront capability, you can create your e-commerce portal for your customers.
• Flexible Pricing Strategies:
  1. Use Pricing Strategy templates based on industry best practices to win more window and door business.
  2. Do What-if scenario modeling of your Pricing Strategy and its impact on Products in real-time.
  3. With a Prizing Wizard, Create a Pricing plan based on requirements and pain points from your customer.
  4. Offer better differentiation for your products from other competitive products.
• Unified Bill of Material (BOM):
  1. Create a BOM from individual products and assemblies.
  2. Send Work Order Traveler to Shop Floor electronically with BOM and Product Routing steps. This helps to avoid any manual entry during the production process. Also, it helps in completing the Work Orders and quickly reporting the completed Work Orders.
  3. Track work-in-progress across Machines and do an inline inspection to improve product quality.
  4. Build innovative products with the same cost-per-unit as mass production lines.
  5. Deliver more value to the customer with negligible increment in manufacturing cost.
  6. Cost the completed Work Orders with one click and view Material Costs, Labor Costs, Overheads, and expenses in a graphical view.
• Service and Warranty:
  1. Offer robust Service Coverage and Warranty using a simple and flexible Contract Creation process.
  2. Service intelligence easily connects customer info with the Service Contract and the Warranty.
  3. Schedule and dispatch Field Service Resources easily after checking active Contracts and Warranties. No need to run reports finding the active Contract and Warranty information.

Features

Conclusion

We offer business value, quicker ROI, and key differentiators for your business growth and process improvement. At the same time, honor your change management, project management, and data governance policies. OpenJanela Software is designed for easier, cheaper implementation and adoption for Small and Medium Businesses. You get direct support from us before, during, and after implementation, with no offshore support. Call us today to discuss our easy and simple terms of open-source licenses for companies of all sizes. What are you waiting for? Reach out to OpenJanela Software at: and Schedule a demo.

References

[1] Mass production of tooling product families via modular feature-based design to manufacturing collaboration in PLM. Ming, X. G., et al. 2007, Journal of Intelligent Manufacturing, Vol. 18, pp. 185–195.

[2] Anderson, D. M. (2003). Build-to-Order and Mass Customization: The Ultimate Supply Chain Management and Lean Manufacturing Strategy for Low-Cost on-Demand Production Without Forecasts. Cambria, A: CIM Press.

Pricing Strategies for Online and E-commerce Window & Door sales

Window and Door Manufacturers and Dealers – Which Pricing Catalog and Price Models work Best for Mobile Apps?

Many pricing book/catalog styles are available; the question is, which is the easiest to maintain and fastest over the internet?

Marked-up Cost:

Suitable for highly competitive situations. It requires the systems to calculate costs and apply a markup globally or by pricing categories, such as base product, glass, or options. A marked-up cost pricing strategy requires accurate costing information and frequent maintenance.

Price by design:

Suitable for selling Predefined or Standard products. It requires that price tables be set up for each design resulting in dozens or even hundreds of tables that need to be maintained. It is by far the most maintenance-intensive pricing structure.

Price by Window Type:

requires pricing tables (such as WxH pricing, Square footage Pricing, or United Inch pricing) for each window/opening type + option pricing. Requires far fewer tables to maintain than #2 above, but still remains maintenance extensive.

Regarding speed over the internet, they are all almost equal as the server does all the work. It is only a question of which is the fastest to process.

For Manufacturers:

While Price By Design is the fastest computationally, I recommend Marked-Up Cost followed by Price By Window Type as these are the easiest and cheapest to maintain.

Marked-Up Cost is the most flexible and best for estimating. It also ensures that changes in parts or labor costs are immediately reflected in the price.

If this is not feasible, then Price By Window Type will ensure your prices remain constant regardless of costs. It is also a very easy way to

For Dealers: (Especially those who work with many suppliers)

I would recommend Marked up cost as there is no need to create elaborate Bills of Materials to get an accurate cost.

For more information and a no-obligation discussion of your needs, please do not hesitate to contact Sherif Eldibani seldibani@opejanela.com

5 Steps to defect-free Windows & Doors

Quality Control takes planning, training, and even company culture changes. None of it is easy, but the cost of Non-Compliance and poor quality is a killer.

However, Quality is not only Free; Quality Pays.

5 Basic Concepts/Steps for a Simple, Cost-effective Quality Control Program

1 – Define your “Customer – Supplier” Pairs.

The first step is a mindset change, and it is necessary to identify What to Quality Control.

• The basic concept is simple: when you do a job, you need to know who your customer is and what they need.
• Salespeople must be specific in identifying the customer’s needs.
• The worker who receives the profiles needs to know what the saw operator expects the profile to be like.
• The person at the welder needs to know what the corner cleaner needs.
• The corner cleaner needs to know what the hardware Station will look for.
• The Screen Department needs to know what the Assembly station requires.
• And so on…

Your entire Operation is a series of Supplier to Customer relationships. We call these Customer-Supplier Pairs.

2 – Create Compliance Rules for each Window/Door Series, Product, Assembly, and Part.

The next step is to identify what each “Customer” requires from its Supplier.

This information forms the basic Quality Compliance Criteria you need. Gather this information by product, part, option, and assembly.

In OpenJanela, we add this information to our Quality Compliance Rules; it could be presented in quality control spreadsheets in a manual system.

The fact is that a Quality Check for a Casement Window will be different than one for a Patio door, so it is important to do this for every product.

There are two types of Quality Control Parameters:

(In a manual system, use simple printed QC Cheat Sheets for each Station)

Pre-Processing QC Checks

• Check Quality before adding any Labor or Material to a Part/Assembly.
• If the Part/Assembly fails the QC check, it is immediately either remade or fixed.

This will prevent you from adding cost to bad parts or assemblies.

Example: Sash Hardware Placement Station

At this station, the Operator receives assembled, cleaned sashes from the Corner Cleaner.

Some potential checks could be:

• Quality of the Cleaned Corners
• Quality of the Weld – No visible cracks
• Quality of the Profile – No obvious scratches or damage

Post Processing QC Checks

Check the Quality of the Part or Assemblies and make sure it conforms to what the next station expects.

Example: Sash Hardware Placement Station

OpenJanela displays a list of parts an operator needs to add to the Assembly. The system will also display the List of Quality Criteria that the next station expects. The operator will check each criterion and accepts or reject the assembly.

• Quality of the Assembly: No Visible Scratches
• Quality of the Installed Hardware: No Scratches on hardware

3 – Use Random Sampling For Large Volume Parts:

Random sampling is an ideal way to check the quality of large volumes of parts.

It assumes that all the parts were checked by the supplier (or previous station), so checking every part is unnecessary.

When you select parts randomly and enough parts (Sample Size), you can establish a percentage of defects.

Your “Level of Confidence” will increase with bigger sample size and proper randomization.

OpenJanela users can set the desired Confidence Level for the quality control process in Preferences. The system will randomly prompt operators to select parts to check. The system will do so enough times to select the Total Number of Parts (sample size) necessary to meet the desired Confidence Level.

4 – Final Quality Control Station

All products leaving the production floor need to be checked.

The list of questions at the Final Assembly should be more encompassing than those asked at processing stations.

OpenJanela’s QC Station changes dynamically based on Product Type, Options, and other factors important to Quality Control.

5 – Use simple statistical tools to analyze QC Data

Use simple Statistical Process Control to identify the frequency of Non-Compliance.

For example:

• How many times were corners not cleaned?
• How many times do welds fail, on which profiles, and at which welder?
• Day/time of occurrences (time of day, season, supplier issues, etc.)?
• Which operator was involved (to identify training or other issues)?

Such data may reveal issues and causes that are not entirely obvious. Armed with this data, you can take steps to rectify issues and prevent them in the future.

Quality Control is an ongoing process. Creating your ultimate program may take a few iterations and refinements.

Please contact me with your questions – No strings attached. I would love to hear your ideas, opinions, and concerns!

At OpenJanela, we understand that no two clients are the same. We customize quality control programs into our paperless factory production system. OpenJanela is built for the way You do business.