Tracking the Transformation of Materials

Whether you make sandwiches or spaceships, pharmaceuticals or process control equipment,  build components for skyscrapers or repair smart phones, you are probably confronted with the same operations tracking problem, which is how to track the transformation of input materials into a finished products without expending a large amount of non-productive overhead labor in the process.

The typical reasons that you need to track your operations are:

1. To know where your customer orders are in the production process in real-time to make sure that customer orders get out on time.
2. To know how much inventory you have on order, in-stock, and committed to other jobs so you are able to make products when needed.
3. To know what each product costs to make in terms of labor, materials, and possibly machine time so you can be more accurate in your bidding and estimating processes.
4. To track inspection and testing to make sure that defective input materials do not get used and that defective products do not get shipped to customers.
5. To capture materials traceability data relating products and where they were shipped to the materials and processes used and the personnel involved to enable rapid recalls of just the effected products.

Over 80% of small to mid-sized operations still do this tracking using paper forms and manual keyboard data entry into Excel spreadsheets or ERP systems. This typically takes the equivalent of one to three full-time equivalent people at a loaded labor cost of $50,000 per year each.

The BellHawk software enables these organizations to inexpensively transition from using paper forms to using mobile computers and barcode scanning to capture this data. This  automated data capture saves the cost of manual data capture and data entry, prevents data entry and operational mistakes, and provides real-time status of customer orders and available inventory. It also accurately captures job cost and materials traceability data.

For small to mid-sized industrial organizations, BellHawk is available in the Cloud, on a subscription basis, typically at a cost of under $1,000 per month. Please see www.BellHawkOnline.com for details.

For larger organizations, with their own IT organizations, BellHawk is available on an affordable annual rental basis for installation in their own data center. This enables these organizations to integrate BellHawk into their own IT infrastructures.