Vision Engraving & Routing Systems

Ivanenok’s goal was to have the RFgen software pay for itself within one year of deployment. “We were looking for a one year ROI, but I think we will definitely exceed that in the first year, based on the amount of time RFgen has saved everyone.”

Armed with their RFgen-enabled tablets, production workers no longer need to walk paperwork around the building. That eliminated 181 hours annually of walking paperwork around the warehouse. RFgen has automated production order processing, saving another 684 hours per year. In total, Ivanenok calculated time savings worth $15,586 each year. The company has also completely eliminated paper from the production process–an additional savings of $6,957 in printing costs and nearly 60,000 sheets of paper saved.

Before RFgen, production workers had no visibility into real-time inventory levels because a paper production order might have been printed out days or even a week earlier. In the time that ensued between printing and pulling parts, inventory levels would change. With RFgen, workers now pull up production orders on their tablets and can see instantly if current inventory levels are sufficient to complete the production order.

“Now, if a line item on a production order has less inventory on hand than what’s needed to complete the production order, the inventory item is highlighted in red. It’s better to figure out inventory problems before starting,” said Ivanenok. “It can take 30 minutes after the fact, but only five minutes if we identify it early.”

To kick off the project, the team at RFgen worked with Ivanenok to capture requirements during a Business Analysis Workshop (BAW). RFgen was deployed about six weeks after Vision Engraving & Routing Systems signed off on the BAW. The project was completed two weeks ahead of schedule and on budget. “The software works exactly as we hoped it would work,” Ivanenok said. “RFgen was incredibly easy to work with. They are very attentive. They listen and they do really good work. There is absolutely nothing that I can say negative about them. They were fantastic through this whole process.”

Ivanenok is already thinking of additional processes to automate in the future and said his first call will be to RFgen. Because RFgen integrates with both SAP Business One version 9.1 and SAP HANA, Ivanenok has the flexibility to pursue whichever technology makes the most sense. He said, “I am pretty certain SAP HANA will be the only database SAP supports at some point in the future. When that happens, it will be easier for me knowing RFgen already supports SAP HANA.”

With RFgen in place, Vision Engraving & Routing Systems could increase production without having to add as much staff, putting the company in an enviable position for growth. “RFgen will make it a whole lot easier for us to scale up for future growth. If we had doubled in size without RFgen, we would have needed to add two people just to process paperwork all day long. Now, with RFgen, no one processes paperwork. There is no ‘scale’. You just hand the production team another tablet.