We will schedule an onboarding meeting with you when we have built your system. The onboarding meeting is where we learn more about your business, talk about your objectives, and decide on the most appropriate data sources to migrate into the system.
We discuss the following topics.
ABOUT YOUR COMPANY
We like to understand the following information before we start so we can build your system appropriately.
-
- does your team operate from more than one location or factory?
- do you have more than a customer-facing brand?
- what accounting system do you use? We support Xero & MYOB
- Who are the key people in the business, and what are their roles with the system? The key people for us are
- the project champion - the person we work with to implement the system.
- the estimators who will be quoting
- do you have dedicated estimators, or do sales staff quote their work?
- the accounts person
- the production manager
- What is your preferred approach to pricing and labour costing?
- do you use pre-determined square metre sell prices for commonly printed products?
- or do you prefer to calculate the actual material requirements and add a markup?
- Do you charge for labour at a factory overhead rate?
- do you use volume markups over and above the calculated price of a job.
- do you offer special prices for groups of clients or customer-specific prices?
- do you have minimum prices for jobs or products?
- do your selling prices for materials have quantity breaks?
- What are your most commonly manufactured products and job types?
- What percentage of your work is repeat orders of customer-specific products
- do you have salespeople? -
- do they have formal budgets?
- are they expected to record sales activity?
- do they have a set of clients that they manage
- do their leads come from web forms or sales automation software like 'Hubspot'
- do you need to manage inventory levels of raw materials, or do you purchase as required?
- do you 'count' inventory for accounting purposes?
- do you hold stock of finished goods on behalf of clients?
- do you manufacture standard products for 'off-the-shelf' sale to clients?
- will you purchase raw materials through the system?
- Invoicing
- do you invoice each job is it is completed or is invoicing completed in a 'batch' (say once a week)
- Are clients invoiced for deposits before work commences?
- Do you part-invoice jobs - for instance, progress payments in construction work?
DOCUMENTS WE NEED
Every company has different ideas about the level of detail they need in their production system. Looking at the documents you use now helps us understand your preferences. We will give you a Dropbox link so you can upload the information below as it comes to hand.
Please provide:
- Examples of job-cards/work-instructions you provide to factory floor staff so we can see how much detail you provide to team members. It helps to see an example of a simple job and a more complex project.
- Quoting spreadsheets or templates you use to calculate prices for clients. If you have a costing system, it helps to see a video of how you do a quote in your current system.
- Standing pricelists for clients - these are static product pricelists you provide or use internally to calculate prices.
- Typical quote/order confirmation/packing slip/ invoice documents you send to clients so we can see the graphic layouts you are using.
- Material price lists from your suppliers if you plan to import these.
- Examples of your 'job board', Work-in-Progress spreadsheets or snapshots of your production calendar
- Configure your branding headers - - Customising Graphic Headers with your Branding – M-Power Software Help Centre
IMPORTING DATA
Here are some sources of data we can use to get you up and running sooner.
- Customers and Suppliers - the best source is often an export of contacts from Xero/ MYOB unless you have a dedicated CRM or an existing manufacturing system you can export from
- Raw Materials - We can import from suppliers' pricelists if you provide them in a suitably formatted Excel format. Please see the attached spreadsheet which you can copy your materials onto for import.
- Users - please complete the attached user sheet.
- Products - you may have a product pricelist we can import.
- Outworked Processes - We can often import suppliers' pricelists for outwork services like laminating, banner finishing etc. provided they are in a suitable format or transcribed onto our spreadsheets.
A Note on Importing
We can import from spreadsheets where all the information is in rows and columns, and each column contains separate data. Spreadsheets will need to be manually re-formatted when they have merged cells, grouping rows, and where information is combined in one cell - for instance, a material with a sheet size of 2400 x 1200 should have the 2400 and 1200 in different columns and not one column with 2400x1200mm in it. Also, number formats must be consistent - a roll of size 1370 mm x 50 metres should be written as 1370 in one column and 50000 in another column.
HOW WE WORK
We will build your system once we receive your direct debit form and agreement. Building the system will take 3-4 days then we will start importing data.
We aim to build a set of product recipes we can review with you. Product recipes are the key to quoting and production management. Once we get the first set completed you can copy and modify these to complete your product catalogue
It is important to begin using the system as soon as possible, even if quoting systems are incomplete. Providing you manually enter the correct price into a quote or job you can use the system end-to-end. The goal is to start early and progressively improve your system and extend it into other areas of the business.
You can book training sessions with us using our booking system and refer to our support materials. We will work with you to lock in a series of regular training sessions to review your progress.
As you work with the system you will have questions and suggestions. We use a ticketing system to manage these requests.
- Using the ticketing system -
- Creating a login - Zendesk | Account Setup as an M-Power Customer
- Submitting Tickets - Zendesk | Submitting and Viewing a Ticket
- You can to schedule training sessions and book time with us
Comments
0 comments
Please sign in to leave a comment.