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====== Perideo MPM - Manufacturing Process Management ======


Perideo MPM is a comprehensive system for managing the manufacturing process. It is designed to track both Engineering and Manufacturing disciplines, as well as 
  - Sales & Quotation, 
  - Procurement & Purchasing, 
  - Inventory & Stores, 
  - Packaging & Shipping and 
  - Invoicing & Receiving. 

Thus it manages both the parts being built, and the documents defining those parts, along with their procurement and delivery.

The Upshot - Data at Your Fingertips

===== Data Structure =====

The Item is the basis upon which many other data are built. Each Item may have any number of sub-items. Architecturally, a sub-item is simply an item. Since any item may be a sub-item of any other item, then any item may have any number of next assemblies, each of which said item is a sub-item thereof. 

An item is a top level assembly (or a detail part) in any context wherein it has no next assembly. Hence it is not a sub-item in this context (though it may be a sub-item of another next assembly in a different context). 

A detail part is an item that has no sub-items (else it would be an assembly). There is a gray area here in that in our system, raw materials are counted as items themselves. So in defining a detail part, its raw material(s) might be added as sub-items, as though an assembly were being defined. This actually works best for MRP (Material Requirements Planning) purposes.

Because of these considerations, no Item is formally designated as any of the following in the underlying data structure... There are no:
- Detail Parts
- Assemblies
- Sub-Parts
- Sub-Assemblies
There are only Items, any of which could be considered one of the aforementioned in relation to, or within the context of a collection of other Items. 

===== Bill of Materials (BOM) =====


Every Item has a BOM

Workflow:
1. Enter your Item(s).
	1. Enter sub-items at the appropriate levels. 
	2. Enter operations.
2. Verify the ML-BOM for each item. 
3. Build a Sales Order. 
4. Create a Work Order from the SO. 
5. Schedule the Resources and Material Acquisitions.
6. Generate Requirements List for the WO
	1. Material Requirements.
	2. Labor Requirements.
	3. Resource Requirements.
7. Generate Shop Travellers for the work.
	1. Raw Material Pull Order
	2. Milling & Prep Order
	3. Lamination Order
	4. Second Operations Order
	5. Assembly Order
	6. Packaging Order
	7. Shipping Order
........
===== The Job =====

- Status
	- Pending
	- Released
- Checklist [a work in progress, until Job is complete]
- Sales Orders [summary view (usually only one, but may comprise multiples)]
- Purchase Orders [direct costs to this job]
- MRP — a summary of materials req'd —from items
	- Tooling Req'd
		- Press risers
		- Fixtures
		- Other
	- Sub-items [Req'd by BOM]
	- Deliverables
		- Line items
			- BOM sub-items
				- Buy-items [from PO or stock]
				- Build-items [see Sub-items above]
- Operations per Job
	- Engineering [mandatory]
		- Check all part data for completeness
		- Check tooling data for completeness
		- Sequence of Workflow
		- All costs are accounted for
		- Approve Job Package for Execution
			- (All required info is present)
	- Material acquisition [mandatory]
		- Material is in stock and ready
	- Resource Allocation [-?]
	- 
- job duration (days)
- scheduled ship date
- associated docs
- 
Operations
- time req'd
- material required

Engineering
- Is every needed piece of info included?
- remaining questions
- job is released

Milling
- info inspected okay/kickback
- board stock descr + qty
- docs/work instructions —from item
  - drawings
  - cnc progs

  - part labels
  - tool labels
  - work instructions

Press
- incoming work inspected okay/kickback
- docs/work instructions
  - part labels
  - press recipe
  - specification
    - grain direction
- laminate stock descr + qty

Post Ops/Assembly
- incoming work inspected okay/kickback
- docs/work instructions
  - drawing
  - specification

Final Inspection
- docs/work instructions
  - QC stickers
- Checklist
  - order is complete, all line items present
  - fit & finish is up to par
  - paperwork is in order
  - Okay to Ship

Packaging
- docs
  - packing list
  - handling units
    - weight
    - dimensions
    - contents

Shipping
- docs
  - packing list
  - manifest/bill of lading
  - carrier info
  - tracking number
  - delivery schedule

... Main Menu ...

Process
- Jobs
  - The Job

- Sales
  - Sales Orders
  - Product Catalogs
  - Sell Items

- Purchasing
  - Purchase Orders
  - Vendor Accounts

Parties
- Customers
- Vendors
- Employees

Company
- Operations
  - Addresses
    - Corporate HQ
    - Sales
    - Ship From
    - Bill to
    - Receiving

- Safety
  - OSHA files
  - Training
  - SDS
  - Initiatives/Projects

Machines
HR-461P
ZR-362P
NCB-442
NC-541PFMC
GANNOmat
Altendoef F45 (table saw)
Joos press

The Bottlenecks:
- No job may be released without the approval of Engineering.

===== Factory Workflow =====


Sales produces a Sales Order
Planning
- Instantiates a Work Order
	- Monitors WO progress, ongoing
	- Adjusts delivery date as required
- Checks engineering package for completeness
	- Kicks package out to Engineering if req'd
	- Acquires Engineering Release 
Engineering
- Verifies BOM and Tool requirements 
- Verifies Ops Sequencing
- Verifies Work Instructions
- Verifies 
- Approves Engineering Release
Planning
- Verifies Materials and Tooling Availability
	- Issues Material Purchase Requisition as/req'd
- Issues Work Order to Production
Production
- Coordinates Material Stock Pulls
- Schedules Jobs to Resources
- Tracks progress, reports qty's twice a day
- Manages workflow, passing work through

Production Checkpoints
- Milling
	- First article inspection
		- F/A checklist filled out and signed
		- production waits for this.
- Prep/sanding
- Spray
-  Press
	- Q/A checkilist filled out and signed
	- Q/A check and sticker on each part

The Documents
TRAVELLER
This is a document that travels with the product through the manufacturing process. There are actually two main sheets: the Head, which travels with the first batch of parts, and the Tail, which travels with the last batch. In addition, there may be any number of mid-process travellers which simply label and quantify each batch in any location.




Questions. ..
What is our standard packaging spec?
- Hard bottom
- Hard top
- Hard sides

Manufacturing Process Management
	Order out of chaos; simplicity out of complexity.
	Simple answers to complex questions.

Steppes  :: Strategic Tools for Efficient Production Planning and Execution, Seriously

What is Steppes?

Designed for the small manufacturing enterprise, Steppes comprises these basic elements:
- SPB: Sales, Purchasing, and Billing
	- Quotation and Sales Order generation
	- Purchase Requisition and Purchase Order generation
	- Shipping and Receiving
	- Invoice generation
	- Job Cost Analysis
- JTS: Job Tracking System
	- Worker scheduling
	- Equipment scheduling
	- Job completion status reporting
	- Labor cost recording
	- WIP summary
- MRP: Material Requirements Planning
	- Multi-level Bill of Materials generation
	- Automatic Sub-Job creation
	- Resource planning
	- Machine and Tooling cost recording
- Inventory
	- Stores for raw material and finished goods
	- Lot tracking, production thru shipping
	- FIFO or LIFO on the fly
	- Certs. Storage and tracking for purchased and incorporated materials.
	- MSDS. Storage and tracking for purchased and incorporated materials.
- DCS: Document Control System
	- Document file management
	- ECO/DCN system (Engineering Change Order / Design Change Notice)
	- MDL (Master Drawing List) with Revision tracking
	- Multi-level indented BOM/Document List
	- Issuance/publication tracking
	- Conformity tracking and reporting for manufactured and purchased items

===== What Steppes is not =====


==== Steppes is not an accounting system. ====
 
<WRAP center round important 90%>
Do not attempt to keep your books using Steppes.
</WRAP>
 
<WRAP center round info 90%>
For bookkeeping, what you need is a double-entry accounting program. Find a good one, learn to use it well, be disciplined, and keep the books yourself. Better yet (IMHO), hire a reputable bookeeper and let him or her use his or her favorite accounting program. It's just accounting. No innovation is required. There are well established, routine ways of doing things, and bookkeepers know how to do those things efficiently. Even better yet, find a bookkeeper who has a good working relationship with your CPA (or even works for your CPA) and let them make the magic happen.
</WRAP>


Steppes is here to provide you, the innovator and businessperson, freedom from the bondage and tedium of bookkeeping —and— to provide your bookkeepers and accountants freedom from the ever-changing demands and complexity of the manufacturing environment.
- You take orders, make stuff, ship it, and bill for it. This is what you are good at; this is where you add value.
- They count the beans and tally the talers. That's what they're good at.
Everyone agrees: it's best if you can stay out of each other's business.

Perideo MPM does not pretend to compete with the major proprietary Enterprise Data Management systems.
If you are a large multinational operation needing coordination of resources at multiple locations and distributed inventories, line balancing, integrated logistics, etc... then Perideo MPM may not be up to the task.

But if you are a comparatively small, localized operation in need of solid fundamental control over your processes; if you don't need or want the complexity and associated learning curve and start-up costs (not to mention the cost of the software itself) of a major proprietary application suite; then Perideo MPM might be a good fit for you.

We know what you need, because we do what you do.

Perideo MPM is not a proprietary, monolithic application program for sale or for rent or lease.
The software is open source, GPL-licensed software which may be freely downloaded, installed, used, modified, and redistributed (under GPL license) by anyone, anywhere, any time.

The Origins of Steppes

From the author and achitect:
Perideo MPM has grown out of  years of my  own frustration in trying to get existing software products to become useful to me. We are a small business. At times we have had up to 15 people working for us as employees and/or sub-contractors. At other times we have scaled down to just four people. And the irony is this: Over the past twenty-five years in business, I have never felt truly in control of my costs and my processes, until I developed Steppes.

We started out, just my partner and I, building plastic injection molds and other precision tooling for local businesses in San Luis Obispo County, California. That was in 1997. We knew that keeping accurate books was important, so we looked for good accounting software. We chose Quickbooks because, well, everyone uses Quickbooks. Twenty-five years later, I now know the reason that everyone uses Quickbooks: Because everyone uses Quickbooks. There's really no other reason. Though it is certainly capable, it is not particularly excellent. It's user interface is, well, a minor nightmare; it's report generation system works well enough I guess, if you prefer 1960s-style data processing methodology. Quickbooks appears to me to be basically an old COBOL program that was ported from an IBM 370 mainframe to a Wnidows PC, with a bunch of spaghetti code tying the loose ends together. That's just my impression. I could be wrong.

But here's the main problem with trying to run a manufacturing operation through accounting software: it's not appropriate, and it is a recipe for failure. What you need is manufacturing software, not accounting software. Doing manufacturing through Quickbooks (using their "Manufacturing" program extensions) is a trap that's just too easy to fall into. And it is frought with pitfalls for the following reasons:
1. You don't want your bookkeeper(s) to be concerned with whether the invoice itemizes the correct quantity of the right revision of the correct item, with the right lot numbers attached, and whether it was drawn either straight off the production line or from the right store(s) of inventory.
2. You don't want your line personnel to be concerned with whether the invoice has been posted to the right A/R account, which segment of it belongs to COGS,  what is the direct vs indirect labor content, or what's taxable and what's not.

I think you get the idea... Production management and accounting are two entirely different worlds. No business owner wants to wear his profit and loss statement on his shoulder, and there are also myriad disaster stories of when thriving companies are taken over by high-level accounting-types who proceed to make really bad tactical decisions in the interest of saving a buck here or there. It's two different worlds.

But there is no need for any animosity between the parties and their concerns. The answer lies in relieving each side of the concerns which should not be theirs—so that they can focus productively on the concerns which should be theirs. Can you not hear the sighs of relief, even now? I know I can.  ;-)


1. Would you like to instantly know how your current open order situation translates into your cash flow forecast?
2. Would you like to quickly know whether everything you've shipped has been invoiced?
3. Would you like to tighten up your shipping-to-invoicing lead time?
4. Do you need an efficient lot-control system—one that makes lot tracking easy, instead of a constant pain in your arsenal of manufacturing procedures?
5. When quality issues arise, are they addressed with veracity, or do you just fill out the customer's SCAR, cut some inter-office memos, and hope for the best?
6. Are your processes passed down from one worker to another by word of mouth based on tradition?
7. Do your jobs have shop travellers attached?  Are your work instructions clearly documented?
8. Are your machine setup sheets kept in a file somewhere on the shop floor, or worse yet, in your technician's head?
9. Do you have to ask your bookkeeper what was the last price you paid for a given raw material?
10. Do you need to make half a dozen phone calls to your vendors in order to quote a lead time to your customer?
11. Would you like to be able to make revenue and expenditure forecasts before they become A/R and A/P?
12. Are you interested in discovering chronic hidden costs which can be directly dealt with, either by  appropriate pricing of deliverables, or by outright elimination?
13. Are you feeling the need to put a stop to the Overhead Creep that has been eroding your profits?
14. Would you like to better manage your price increases, using clear, objective criteria?
15. Do you have a hunch that there's too much non-revenue activity going on in your operation?
16. Are you averse to the idea of hiring a person whose sole job is to track all the data necessary to implement the needed controls?
17. Can your business operate without you? Are you able to take a vacation?

Perideo MPM can help fix these things.

==== Natural—even enjoyable—Workflow ====


Give your people the information they need, when they need it. Don't ask them questions that aren't pertinent to what they're doing at the moment.

Imagine a Manufacturing Process Management system that actually makes your workers' jobs easier, rather than bogging them down  with a miles-long paper trail.

Steppes is designed with the Workflow in mind. Thus,  data input flows naturally out of the activities which the operator is performing at any given time. 

It's actually a bit of a thrill to finish part of a build-to-order job, then simply Pick the quantity off of the Sales Order Line Item within the Job, and then click on Create Shipment, and watch your Packing List and Shipment Statement jump onto the screen, with Qty Shipped and BO Qty automatically filled in, along with the Ship-to address. Now simply select the carrier, type in the Tracking/Pro Number, the number and type of handling units (boxes, pallets, etc.)... And you're done.

The shipment is now logged as "shipped," the Job and Sales Order both refect that fact, and one single mouse click generates the invoice. One additional mouse click sends a PDF of the invoice to the customer.

How easy is that?

You can easily check the "uninvioced shipments" screen each morning and then generate and send those invoices in literally seconds, or you can have your shipping clerk send the invoices on the fly at time of shipping.

Alternatively, you can have the invoices automatically generated, and pre-program the invoices to be sent after a preset delay of x days after shipping, on a per-customer basis. Checking up on everything entails simply looking at the "un-sent invoices" screen and/or the "un-invoiced shipments" screen.

Now, for the accounting (bookkeeping) back end... Your bookkeeper must now enter the invoice into the books. Note, however, that only the customer and the invoice total amount are pertinent (although they might want to split out shipping and handling). Other splits might be needed for companies running a more complex set of accounts, but for most small businesses, A/R is all that really matters here. Your bookkeeper should be able to reconcile A/R with Steppe invoices in a matter of minutes. And here's the magic: Neither you, nor anyone on the floor need be concerned with matters of accounting! This is freedom.

==== Sales Orders with scheduled deliveries ====


Some customers like to issue "Block POs, with scheduled deliveries." Other customers prefer to issue a separate PO for each scheduled delivery. Within some systems this presents a difficulty. But Steppes doesn't care, either way. And you can set it up to your liking.

In Steppes, when you enter a Sales Order (SO), you may assign all line line items to a single Job, or each line item to its own Job, or any combination thereof. Furthermore, line items on different SOs may be assigned to the same Job. This is an important capability because 

- The way that work is purchased is not always reflective of the way in which it is accomplished.

A Job may be created on the fly at any time by simply attaching an SO line item to it. Once said line item is assigned to a Job, all work is accomplished and logged against that Job. Workers log their time by entering their hours and the Job Number. 

Purchases may also be attached to a Job. Steppes will then add those purchases to the job cost. Purchases may be fractionally "distributed" across multiple Jobs.

Raw materials may be purchased directly for the Job, or drawn from inventory stores (with lot tracking). Costs may be calculated on the basis of "original purchase cost," or "current replacement cost."

When creating a Job, any of the following may be added to the job screen (none are explicitly required):
- Tasks to be performed
- Items to be shipped
- Items to be produced
- Inventory pulls of finished goods
- Inventory pulls of raw materials
- Resources (machines, people, and processes) to be utilized

Although most Jobs are brought into existence by a Sales order, some Jobs may have no directly associated revenue, and they might not result in any shipments.

==== FAQ ====


 --> Can multiple purchases of an item be rolled into a single Job for production?#
Yes.
A Job may include multiple items shipping to multiple customers, quantities of one item shipping to multiple customers, items shipping to one customer against multiple POs, etc.
 <--
 --> Can one Packing List include items from differing Purchase Orders?#
Yes.
Steppes will then automatically generate a separate Invoice for each PO, for your customer's convenience.
 <--
 --> Can a Job include items shipping to more than one location?#
Yes.
When generating Packing Lists, Steppes automatically groups Items according to the Ship-To address on the Sales Order (which was previously taken from the PO). Items from more than one PO may be shipped together, though they will be invoiced separately.
 <--
 --> What systems does Steppes run on?#
Steppes is a web server application. It runs best on a LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, Mysql, Php). It may then be accessed and used through any of the leading web browsers such as Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Edge if you must, or even the venerable, yet long since obsolete, Internet Explorer. There is nothing to install on your shop or office workstations.

Steppes is also mobile-friendly, so you can even use your smartphone.
 <--
 --> What does Steppes cost?#
We have a three-tier pricing plan:
  - Tier One: Full Package. You get everything—all modules; the complete Steppes system, ready to install and run. Price is US$ 1,000.00
  - Tier Two: Full Package. You get everything—all modules; the complete Steppes system, ready to install and run. Price is US$ 100.00
  - Tier 3: Full Package. You get everything—all modules; the complete Steppes system, ready to install and run. Price is US$ 10.00
  - Alternatively, you may download the software for free. It is open source software, licensed under GPL version 
 <--
==== Permanent Archived Records of all Documents ====


While Sales Orders, Purchase Orders, Work Orders, Shipment Packing Lists, etc. are being developed, they are editable pages. Once all editing is complete and the document is ready to be published, it is "cast" into a PDF document and archived. Additionally, its fields are locked so that they may no longer be changed (editing is disabled).

However, subsequent revisions of the document may be made (which are tracked) by selecting "Revise Document"; all previous revisions become permanent record. An operator with sufficient privileges may, however, delete or purge older revisions in the event that becomes necessary.

When a document is revised, it will say so in the header, drawing the reader's attention to the fact. First issues are "rev. 0,” subsequent revisions will say "Revised" and "rev. 1[2, 3...]", etc. The "revised-on"  date will also be shown.

As an option, Steppes can generate a DCN (Document Change Notice) to inform any recipients of the document that a change has taken place.

==== Detailed Data List ====


- Customer
	- Cust. No.
	- Our Vendor No.
	- Billing terms
	- » Address(es)
		- Main
		- Ship-to
		- Bill-to
		- Contact
	- Fone
	- Phax
	- Email
	- Website
- Vendor
	- Vendor No.
	- Our Cust. No.
	- Our Acct. No.
	- Billing terms
	- » Address(es)
		- Main
		- Ship-to
		- Bill-to
		- Contact
	- Fone
	- Phax
	- Email
	- Website
- Sales Order
	- SO No.
	- SO date
	- Ship-to address
		- » SO Line Item(s)
	- Line Item Notes
	- Shipping/handling chg.
	- Adjustments
	- SO total
- SO Line Item
	- » Item
	- Order Qty
	- Request date
	- Price
	- » Job

What Perideo MPM SAAS offers

Technical support
Tier 1
Tier 2

Online subscription
Use our online server to run your company in the cloud

Preconfigured, customized server hardware built to order and delivered to your IT department. 

In-house system management
Run your company entirely in-house on your own hardware