Custom software development in Lancaster, OH

Custom Software in Lancaster

The schedule that only one person can read

Lancaster is a manufacturing town, and manufacturing scheduling has a recognizable shape. There is a spreadsheet, it is colored, the colors mean something, and one scheduler knows what. It handles mold changes, batch sizes, cure times and the orders that cannot slip, and it has evolved for a decade without anyone writing down the rules.

Replacing that is not a software problem first. It is an interviewing problem. The rules have to be extracted and written down before any screen is designed, and the person who holds them has to agree the written version is right.

The second local project type is traceability. When a customer asks which batch went into their order, the answer should not require three people and an afternoon.

What we would look at first in Lancaster

• What the colors in the scheduling spreadsheet actually mean, written down and confirmed
• Which constraints are real, such as cure times and mold changes, and which are habit
• How a batch is identified, and whether that identifier survives to the shipping paperwork
• How long it takes today to answer which batch went into a given order
• What the scheduler does that nobody has ever seen documented

What custom software development includes in Lancaster

• A free audit that interviews the scheduler first and writes the rules down
• A blueprint of the scheduling and batch rules, confirmed by the person who holds them
• Prototypes of the schedule view, clicked through and corrected before the build
• Batch identity carried through from production to the shipping paperwork
• Staged delivery, so the spreadsheet and the new schedule run side by side for a while
• The source, the data and the documentation handed over at the end

Production discovery needs someone on the floor, and US-33 makes that a half-day trip from our office rather than a planned expedition.

How Custom Software works, step by step →