It’s Quiz Time: What Kind of EnterpriseIQ User Are You?

Ever take a quiz to find out what “kind” you are? For example, what kind of sports fan, boss or cookie are you?

I thought it would be fun to find out what kind of IQMS EnterpriseIQ user you are. Keep track of your answers (A, B or C) and tally your score at the bottom to see how savvy you are when it comes to using your manufacturing ERP solution.

Question No. 1: As the plant foreman, the first thing you do when you wake up in the morning is:

A. Get up two hours before your shift starts, drive to work and fix everything before your boss arrives. Every day, five days a week.

B. Call the shop floor shift supervisor to see what disasters occurred overnight to gauge how early you have to go in. The shop floor supervisor is somewhat familiar with the EnterpriseIQ RealTime tools.

C. Pull up RealTime Monitoring on your smartphone or tablet to view the status of jobs currently running and past shift information (including downtime and rejects), then go back to sleep for an hour. Your shop floor can run lights out.

Question No. 2: To determine what jobs you need to run and in which order, including factors such as ensuring you have enough material, the history of where the jobs have run the best, whether dependent demand has been scheduled and if labor and work center capacity are available, you do the following:

A. Use a whiteboard. It has always worked for you (Well, sort of. Not really, but it’s familiar and has gotten the job done since 1988).

B. Use a spreadsheet system, where several departments input information onto different worksheets from duplicate data that was already entered into EnterpriseIQ, and then have your scheduler spend seven hours a day making sure it’s “all going to work out.”

C. Have your scheduler run Update Schedule in EnterpriseIQ. In about 6.75 hours less time than option B would have taken, your plant floor supervisor is ready to set up jobs, materials are ordered and you and the scheduler are kicking it in the break room.

Question No. 3: An Engineering Change Order (ECO) has been submitted. It’s 5:30 pm and you do the following:

A. Stop the presses! You don’t know when the change order is in effect and can’t risk manufacturing any more parts.

B. Keep the presses running but contact several departments (some of which have gone home for the day, so you leave a voicemail or send an email) and let them know who needs to do what. Then spend half of the next day making sure those steps occurred.

C. Enter a change order into EnterpriseIQ (including an effective date), run a workflow and let the software take care of the rest. All departments will receive their approval notifications on their smartphones with links to the workflow and the entire process can be approved before you sit down to watch Jeopardy.

Question No. 4: As the plant foreman, you get grief from every department and today it’s from customer service. Why aren’t the items on order available to ship?

A. You take their word for it, assuming Customer Service knows how to use the software. You scramble around the inventory racks and then look in the boxes near the work centers before instructing your foreman to stop a work center, set up the job and create more inventory.

B. You look in EnterpriseIQ and find out the inventory was shipped to a “special” customer (again, doesn’t customer service know how to do this?). Your boss approved it because they “really needed it” and he “didn’t think it was a big deal, just make more.” Turns out customer service entered that order as well.

C. You direct customer service to the EnterpriseIQ inventory availability module. On one screen they can see where inventory is located and its availability (on hand, non-conform and non-allocated on hand), then drill down to projected on hand and even search by AKA. Next, you direct them to the make to order features so no matter what, a work order will be generated for that “special” customer, even if there’s enough on hand. Finally you advise them to watch the Sales Orders training videos on MyIQMS.

Question No. 5: You’d like to move up to Director of Manufacturing and need to prove yourself to the higher-ups. You have great ideas to improve the company’s processes, so you do the following:

A. Create a PowerPoint presentation and insert graphs with manually entered data.

B. Write a report with graphs that somewhat gets your point across with data that is accurately pulled from the database.

C. Read up on What’s New with EnterpriseIQ and find out somebody has already entered a Software Enhancement Request (SER) asking for what you need: A Business Intelligence Dashboard capable of generating powerful Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). The higher-ups can access these KPIs from their smartphones and you are a hero. Standby for your job promotion.

Now tally your answers:

If you answered mostly A: You probably aren’t using EnterpriseIQ. Non-User.
If you answered mostly B: You may be utilizing a small portion of the functionality in EnterpriseIQ. Novice.
If you answered mostly C: You are familiar with a lot of what EnterpriseIQ has to offer. Professional. By receiving some training, reading TechNotes and help files and keeping up to date on what’s new through free virtual training courses, you are on your way to your promotion to Director of Manufacturing!