We are a smaller company that is rapidly growing. We build handcrafted custom tables as well as many other custom furniture pieces. Our operation currently consists of 4 storefronts for sales and 2 shops where the furniture is crafted and finished. One of the shops only does production where the order is only built and not finished. Most of the orders are built here. The second shop mainly focuses on the finishing (painting, staining, etc.) of the orders but does have some production as well.
We currently use monday.com to track all of our orders and where they are at in the production process. The current setup is not as efficient or easy to use as we know it could be so we are looking to get help with a redesign of the platform to help automate many of the tasks and ultimately make it easier to use for our sales team and production/finishing managers to get a clear idea of what orders need to get done and in what order they need to get done as well as let them and the sales team know where each order is in the build process.
We are ultimately looking for someone that can help redesign the platform and/or even just give us “training” on how to properly obtain the information we need through different types of reports or ways of managing the data within. There may be easy ways to accomplish some of these problems and there are also some more complex methods that will probably need to be used to achieve our desired outcomes.
Below is an outline of what goals we are trying to achieve as well as current problems and the requirements we are looking to implement within the platform.
Basic Flow Overview
This is a basic overview of the process we are looking to streamline from start to finish.
- Order Taken
- Payment Made
- Order Entered into monday.com
- Order Added to Production Queue
- Order Built
- Order Sent to Finishing
- Order Finished
- Order Delivered or Picked Up
- POSSIBLE - Recall Occurs
- Recall Order is Entered into monday.com
- Recall Order Added to TOP of Production Queue or a Separate Recall Queue
- Recall Order Built/Repaired and Finished
- Recall Order Delivered or Picked Up
Goals
The overall goal is to streamline this process, automate as much as possible, and make this platform as “idiot-proof” as we can to avoid key information missing in the system or having orders get “lost” within the system. We are also trying to eliminate mis-builds and recalls due to wrong for missing information.
Problems & Requirements
Here is the list of requirements and what we are looking to have the platform do for our company.
- One of the biggest problems we currently have is orders being submitted on the monday.com platform without all of the information/columns being filled out. This leads to many unnecessary calls to the sales team from production managers trying to get information and leads to errors in the builds. It is vital to have all of the information entered and available for every order. We would like to have a way to make sure that the sales team CANNOT submit an order into monday.com unless ALL required fields are filled out. Really, the order can go into the system, but we do not want it to be sent to the production queue until all of the information is entered. If customers are still on the fence on how they want an order built, what type of wood they want or what finish they want, we don’t want it in the queue because it may get built before the customer gives a final response or puts in a change order leading us to have to rebuild the order again. We do have a time limit in place. After a certain number of days, an order cannot be changed without a charge but wee still don’t want orders making it to the queue until they are complete. This will also keep our sales staff accountable in making sure they keep contact with their customers to get all of the information needed to complete their order. It would also be great to have a way for each sales associate to see a list of all of their incomplete orders so they know whoo to reach out to.
- Another problem is the lack of ease of use and access. We currently have several different boards for the different sales associates and locations which makes it difficult to find orders when on mobile devices, which most of us are using on a daily basis. We don’t always have easy access to a computer to be able to quickly look up the information needed for any given order in question so having it easily accessible is needed for efficiency. We would like to have everything in one board. Really we just need a single higher level board that includes all of the orders from the many sub boards we have for each sales associate/location. If it’s easier to make a single board, we can go that route, or if its easier to just have a separate board that includes all of the information contained in the sub boards we can go that route as well. The initial reason for the separate boards was to be able to track the sales of each sales associate and location but I feel like there really isn’t a need for separate boards to accomplish and track this information and that we overcomplicated the initial setup here when we first designed and built our layout.
- A third problem we have is there is no inventory tracking for all of the common “stock” or extra pieces we have in storage. We have to physically try and track down and see if we have certain pieces already built before we give the orders to production. This leads to double builds and sometimes wrong/delayed orders because it looked like a certain piece or size and it turned out that it wasn’t actually correct so we have to rush to try and get that piece completed quickly to get the order out on time. We would like to have a way to keep track of all of our extra inventory and ideally a way for the system to check the dimensions and type of new orders coming in against that inventory and assign it to the order right away. Or at least give some type of notice that says “Hey, you have so and so base in storage and you have a top that could potentially work for this order.” Then we can manually go in to make sure it will in fact work and then remove it from the inventory database.
- We would like to have a board for the order queue and a board for recall order queue if needed. Or a way to see the incomplete orders in a timeline type fashion. As explained above, recall orders need to take priority above all the other orders. So if we can include a way to ensure recall orders goto the top of the production queue that would be the ideal path. If not then we just need to have 2 queues that display all of the orders we have, sorted in order of their due date. The earliest due date is at the top and the latest due date is at the bottom. With this, we need an automation set up so that as soon as an order is submitted and all required fields are completely filled out, it adds it to the order queue.
- We would like to have a pickup queue that tracks all of the orders that are completely built and ready to be picked up from the production location to be taken to the finishing location.
These are the biggest things we need addressed at the moment and we would love any input and are open to different options or ways to achieve these goals. If this seems like something you would be able to help us out with, we would like to hear from you and get this in the works. Thanks!
