FileMaker in Manufacturing

This manufacturing project was started by two in-house staff members. After some initial success in automating the work of the graphics department, the in-house team ran into some roadblocks in automating the more complex manufacturing areas of the company. I was brought in to help move the project forward.

Working together with the in-house team and managers, we were able to create a system that captures the complexity of their manufacturing process to get the project back on track. Because we were generating a positive return on investment for the company, the project was expanded to cover most of the company processes, up to the hand-off to the accounting system, and eventually expanded to more than 72 tables covering the following departments:

Graphics
Customer Service
Manufacturing (in all its many aspects)
Purchasing
Resource Costing
Inventory
Shipping (integrated with EDI)

Two of the big challenges of this project:

Carefully making changes to a pre-existing system in constant use
Managing a project with more than 200 sub-projects and, at times, as many as 10 active sub-projects