Obviously this hasn’t happened yet, but in the final week of the year, Doug Fleenor Design does a complete inventory count and compares it to the inventory listings which are kept in BusinessWorks. Since it is such a small company, there is only one physical inventory per year.
To do the inventory, BusinessWorks prints out an inventory checklist, with how many of each part there are supposed to be, and you pick a page and start counting. I’ve gotten a taste of it during the power outage, where we attempted to be productive by doing some of the inventory, before I got pulled away to work on the generator. They tell me that doing a full inventory is not too bad, until you get to the pages that have the resistors and other tiny parts that have to be counted. I’m kinda curious how you count 500-1000 of something that is so light, that even a scale won’t be accurate enough to measure it.
Friday, December 10, 2010
Week of December 6th – Website Development
Throughout the semester I’ve been trying to get a chance to redesign the website of Doug Fleenor Design, but I’ve been met with a lot of resistance to “change what works already”. I wanted to upgrade the website to a Joomla/Database driven site format, but the owner Doug Fleenor likes the fact that the website will load correctly on the most ancient of browsers and old computers.
So I just did slight improvements and updating of content, and improving the look of the site, without changing much of the original simple theme.
I suggested to install Google Analytics a few months ago, which Doug Fleenor Design did, which gave me some information as to which sites are visited most often. Most users either visit the site to download spec sheets, or visit the “fun” section, which has DMX powered products “of questionable use”. Really it’s just joke products that were produced as an attention grabber at past trade shows to entice attendees to visit the booth. Products include “DMX controlled shock collar” – to wake up spot light operators which are dozing off, a “DMX controlled coffee machine” – so a lighting technician has coffee waiting for him in the break room, or a “DMX controlled treadmill”, and others.
So I just did slight improvements and updating of content, and improving the look of the site, without changing much of the original simple theme.
I suggested to install Google Analytics a few months ago, which Doug Fleenor Design did, which gave me some information as to which sites are visited most often. Most users either visit the site to download spec sheets, or visit the “fun” section, which has DMX powered products “of questionable use”. Really it’s just joke products that were produced as an attention grabber at past trade shows to entice attendees to visit the booth. Products include “DMX controlled shock collar” – to wake up spot light operators which are dozing off, a “DMX controlled coffee machine” – so a lighting technician has coffee waiting for him in the break room, or a “DMX controlled treadmill”, and others.
Week of November 29th – Prototype
This week I got to observe Doug work on the housing for a product which has been “on the drawing board” for a couple of years. It is essentially the Preset10-A, but it uses capacitive touch and allows you to define each button as either a group, attribute, fixture or preset. It also makes it so you don’t need to bring an external source of DMX to set it up, and you can change the looks, too. It’s now the end of the week, and I can tell that this particular development puzzle won’t be finished quickly. Doug has already gone through three different iterations of the housing.
Doug has been trying to decide how to make this product, the Chameleon, look professional, but still function reliably. He has found that the capacitive touch abilities aren’t nearly reliable enough for the company’s standards, and has had to re-do much of his work over the years. I found that, while I was theoretically helping him design the housing, I mostly functioned as a sounding board for his musings, and offered only topical insight into the product’s development.
I’ve gotten a lot of “we tried that already, didn’t work”, “it works, but sometimes it starts acting weird”, I guess that’s the difference between theoretical knowledge and actually trying it in person, in a real environment.
Doug has been trying to decide how to make this product, the Chameleon, look professional, but still function reliably. He has found that the capacitive touch abilities aren’t nearly reliable enough for the company’s standards, and has had to re-do much of his work over the years. I found that, while I was theoretically helping him design the housing, I mostly functioned as a sounding board for his musings, and offered only topical insight into the product’s development.
I’ve gotten a lot of “we tried that already, didn’t work”, “it works, but sometimes it starts acting weird”, I guess that’s the difference between theoretical knowledge and actually trying it in person, in a real environment.
Week of November 22nd – Accounting and Shipping
This week I got to watch the accounting/shipping part of the manufacturing process. They showed me the entire process, from accepting a purchase order, to shipping it to the end customer.
DFD accepts purchase orders three ways: by e-mail, fax and over the phone. The orders are taken, confirmed, and then put in an a central area where a single person can either pull the entire order and box it up, or take it and [in the case of a custom order], design and build it themselves. I got to watch a bit of the custom design work, but I mostly worked on the orders made up of standard products.
After you receive a purchase order, you have to review the order and make sure you understand what they are ordering, and that the prices are correct. If you have any questions, you’re supposed to call the purchasing agent and confirm or correct whatever information is in question.
The confirmed purchase order is then filled by taking the products off of the shelves where they’re stored, re-testing them [so they’re tested directly after being built, and just before they’re shipped to the customer], and packing them in the correct type of shipping box depending on how they will be shipped. Shipments going ground are put into a normal box, and Overnight and 2nd Day Air packages are put into either a UPS or FedEx Express box.
After the products have been boxed up, they are measured and weighed, and readied for invoicing and shipping. Their inventory system doubles as an invoicing and accounting software, so when a product is invoiced, the serial numbers are taken out of inventory and shown to have been sent to whichever account purchased them.
After I got the hang of it, they let me do a few very simple orders. I didn’t get to actually create the invoice and shipping label, but I did everything else.
DFD accepts purchase orders three ways: by e-mail, fax and over the phone. The orders are taken, confirmed, and then put in an a central area where a single person can either pull the entire order and box it up, or take it and [in the case of a custom order], design and build it themselves. I got to watch a bit of the custom design work, but I mostly worked on the orders made up of standard products.
After you receive a purchase order, you have to review the order and make sure you understand what they are ordering, and that the prices are correct. If you have any questions, you’re supposed to call the purchasing agent and confirm or correct whatever information is in question.
The confirmed purchase order is then filled by taking the products off of the shelves where they’re stored, re-testing them [so they’re tested directly after being built, and just before they’re shipped to the customer], and packing them in the correct type of shipping box depending on how they will be shipped. Shipments going ground are put into a normal box, and Overnight and 2nd Day Air packages are put into either a UPS or FedEx Express box.
After the products have been boxed up, they are measured and weighed, and readied for invoicing and shipping. Their inventory system doubles as an invoicing and accounting software, so when a product is invoiced, the serial numbers are taken out of inventory and shown to have been sent to whichever account purchased them.
After I got the hang of it, they let me do a few very simple orders. I didn’t get to actually create the invoice and shipping label, but I did everything else.
November 18th – Power Outage!
This isn’t a normal blog entry, but I thought it would be interesting to talk about. Today, around 8:30am, there was a power outage that affected the entire area where Doug Fleenor Design is. The power didn’t come on until around 11, so between those times there was very little that everyone could do. DFD has a generator that they use for times when the power goes out, but it wasn’t working correctly. We pretty much used the time to clean the shop and do whatever phone work we could do. I attempted to help troubleshoot the generator with Doug and Milton, and it was an interesting experience. At one point Doug went down to the local hardware store to get a couple parts for the generator, and discovered that they were out of power, too. Then, once the power came back on, it was back to business as usual.
Week of November 8th – Working steadily
The influx of orders has increased quite a bit since the week after LDI, so I haven’t really had a chance to change what I’ve been working on. I’m mostly helping in the assembly area, working on pc boards, assembling products and testing. I have found that I typically end up in the assembly area, because it always has something going on. All of the other parts of the company ebb and flow throughout the day and week, but there is always something being built, either for stock or a particular order.
The week hasn’t been amazingly interesting, at least not compared to the weeks leading up to and including LDI, but I’m getting really good at soldering.
The week hasn’t been amazingly interesting, at least not compared to the weeks leading up to and including LDI, but I’m getting really good at soldering.
Week of October 25th – Post Trade Show
Once we returned to California on Tuesday after the show, we immediately went into Post Trade Show mode. Typically, after LDI, there is a large influx of orders because people are reminded that they like DFD’s products, and they send in orders. Thankfully, the barrage of orders hasn’t hit yet, so we might be able to produce enough stock so we aren’t scraping by and doing lots of small runs of product.
We’re offering the 21 dimmers that we spent so much time building before LDI at half off, because they are pretty much ‘prototype’ quality, and nowhere near what the finalized versions will look like. During LDI, we had a few people purchase them, and take them home on the final day of the show.
After the trade show, I was sort of put in charge of going through the thousands of pictures we had taken, and removing duplicates, and then deciding how to present them. I initially wanted to do a collage of the pictures, and found a program online which would allow me to do it easily, but Doug asked me to group the pictures by date, so people could find themselves easily. I ended up uploading them to the company’s Facebook page under their respective date headings, but not before becoming pretty good at the collage-making software.
We’re offering the 21 dimmers that we spent so much time building before LDI at half off, because they are pretty much ‘prototype’ quality, and nowhere near what the finalized versions will look like. During LDI, we had a few people purchase them, and take them home on the final day of the show.
After the trade show, I was sort of put in charge of going through the thousands of pictures we had taken, and removing duplicates, and then deciding how to present them. I initially wanted to do a collage of the pictures, and found a program online which would allow me to do it easily, but Doug asked me to group the pictures by date, so people could find themselves easily. I ended up uploading them to the company’s Facebook page under their respective date headings, but not before becoming pretty good at the collage-making software.
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