Northwest Aerospace News February | March 2019 Issue No. 7 | Page 62

T
hey decided to launch a DFM
newsletter and boot camp for custom-
ers and even went as far as sending
out engineers to customer offices to
hold “Office Hours” where they would
support the customer in reviews of
drawings to identify opportunities for
applying DFM. These reviews didn’t
just focus on Pro CNC’s products —
and while some could view this as po-
tentially supporting a competitor, Pro
CNC recognized that this generated
goodwill that attracted new business
and outweighed the risks. The cus-
tomer-centric DFM approach paid off,
ensuring more hours of value-added
activity in their shop operations and re-
ducing overhead costs. This facilitated
a reduction of the cost per labor hour
and hence allowed them to provide
more competitive pricing, leading the
company to grow to $11 million annual
revenue.
Using Industry 4.0 as an enabler to productivity and affordability
Another huge component of Pro CNC’s
success related to their early adoption
of Industry 4.0, as they developed a
robust digital infrastructure with sys-
tems and processes that communicat-
ed seamlessly. This came about three
years into their journey as they realized
that a key component to growing their
success would be better software prod-
ucts. Like many companies, they were
using Excel and QuickBooks, but these
couldn’t scale as their business grew.
After being underwhelmed by visits
from various software vendors they de-
cided to develop their own. They hired
a software developer and together they
created what is now known as ProShop,
a Digital Manufacturing Ecosystem
that contains everything needed to run
their company in an efficient, effective
way, including the following features:
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AS9100 QMS module
ERP functions for managing orders and inventory
MES (Manufacturing Execution Systems) for managing shop floor functions
CMMS (Computerized Maintenance Management) functionality
The system focused on providing all the tools needed for the people doing their
jobs, enabling them to concentrate on working productively, and combined dif-
ferent software categories into a single product. Furthermore, the system was 100
percent paperless, contained in the cloud and available on any mobile device.
From consumer to supplier
It was never the team’s intent to sell the product but their software, now known
as ProShop, eventually became a product in its own right, based on a pull from
customers. Through vendor visits and customer audits, they received the feedback
that it was “the best system they had ever seen” and soon other companies started
coming to them asking if they would be willing to sell it. The more they talked to
these companies, the more they heard the common response that when it came to
software, people were buying the “least bad option”!