Monday the dock waits to be told which pallets go on which truck, and somebody senior does the end-of-day report by hand. Every plant has a position like that — one that wouldn't exist if a spreadsheet could do it.
The job I eliminated compiled pick tickets, typed the bills of lading, and sent the customer an end-of-day production report. All of it lived with one person. Now the system builds the tickets and the dock works off a tablet.
I am an operations manager. I run a plant floor Monday through Friday. I built that system for my own building because nobody was going to come build it for us.
Mine weren't either. The people running that system are adults with learning and physical disabilities working in a sheltered workshop. Tablets, barcode scanners, live production data, every day for more than a year.
What made it work was that the floor got to tell me what to change, and I changed it. Adoption turned out to be the easy part.
Two days on your floor watching the real process. You get a written system spec and an ROI model, yours to keep whether or not you ever hire me to build anything. Credited in full against the build.
Paid in three milestones. The second comes due after a working version is running in your building, with your people, on your real data. Stop there and you keep what's built plus the documentation.
Monitoring, fixes, and two hours of change work every month. Optional, cancel any time. Hosting runs $25 to $50 and you pay the provider directly, so there is nothing for me to mark up.
It is the right question, and you should ask it of anybody who builds you software. Here is how I answer it.
You are buying an asset that happens to have been built by me.
Answer six questions about how your floor runs. You get back a written read on your three most expensive manual processes and roughly what each one costs you a year. I email it to you and that is the end of it unless you write back.
Operations at a manufacturing plant in St. Joseph, Missouri. Twenty-two years in the Army before that, retired senior non-commissioned officer. I live in Kansas City.
I still have the day job and I am not going to be cute about that. It is most of why I am worth hiring — I am in a building like yours every weekday.
I take one build at a time, on purpose. If I am already in one when you are ready, I will tell you when I am free.