Streamline Your Workflow with Our Project Management Invoice Template for Production

Project management invoice template for Production

so i'm currently logged into manage as myself the first thing that you're going to notice it has a familiar interface very similar to pdm or say windows explorer this is what we call your home dashboard this dashboard like everything in manage can be configured and customized to what the user or what the organization needs the thing that i like to personally look at first is my task list now there's a few ways to look at this you can look at this globally which is my default dashboard we can drill into actually specific tasks that have been assigned to me now when i generally do that i like to take a look at the due dates now right off the bat i can sort all tasks that have been assigned to me now some of these tasks might be things you're familiar with like producing 3d models but there's a lot of other things that i need to do outside of using solidworks for example creating bills and materials which is our shipping bomb developing the instruction manual doing analysis work on key components maybe there are some risks that we need to mitigate for example looking at the laser cutting machine it looks like it's having some issues all these tasks are tasks that follow in my bucket of work to do the first thing i notice is i see that this task is actually appears to be two days late so let's take a look at that and drill into what this task is related to and the rest of the general interface that a user is going to be seeing first thing is it's very similar to pdm by simply clicking on anything you're going to get some supplementary information usually down here at the bottom of the screen i can see that this task is two days late it's got about eight hours that are assigned to me and i haven't even started it yet this task is associated with this project this project is project six and it looks like it's some sort of laser guide for a miter saw now let's drill into this by using a simple right click i can navigate in and out of my information when i navigate to it i can see project project 6 and i'm gonna see all of the information that corresponds to this project now let's understand what this information is the first is is your actual project information for this project now this is a hundred percent customizable for me this captures my project number this project description uh what kind of project type in this case we're defining this as new product introduction so it's something that we're designing from scratch we can see the process that's controlling it it's under uh the development and any other information that the sales team or project manager or quoting team included including estimated hours capital cost maybe the due date or when we started or completed this project now let's look at the rest of these tabs the next thing we're going to look at is what we call related files so what related files is is sometimes we have supplementary information that doesn't exist inside pdm or inside our vault this gives us a place to store this for all of our projects it needs to have a checklist which make sure that we've done all the things that our market marketing team and our sales team is providing to actually do this project so in this case we call that our project checklist and that just gets simply stored inside this project giving everybody access to it in one simple interface now probably one of my favorite things and what most of my customers are leveraging is what we call a project plan this project plan actually helps us outline the flow of the data right and the flow of the information not just the files across all stages of the organization in this project we can see that we have time allocated for the design for technical publications manufacturing physical testing and then finally our review and wrap-up meeting now these items are time dependent on the previous item so as we log our work and as we adjust our process plan this is going to automatically adjust for the downstream activities the next thing we'll take a look at is what we call the to-do list or our task list this gives us a global look at all the info and all the tasks that need to be accomplished and need to be completed for this project to actually come to fruition the bill of material a lot of you guys might be familiar with that term bill of material and most of you are probably familiar with an engineering bomb which is generally the bill material that's coming out of solidworks but a lot of the time we have what we call a manufacturing bomb or a shipping bomb or a bill of laden and that is outside of things that we model up or things that we engineer this gives us a project build material that we can actually control not just our cad document but we can actually feed in other supplementary items that don't correspond to a model or correspond to a drawing our project deliverables goes hand in hand with the different stages of the planning phase so as we complete a different stage generally there's deliverables that come out of that stage and this is where we capture that and we'll see that a little bit later and then these last two items are what we call special objects special objects are things that you might care about that we don't have already in the system in this case this gives us a place and a placeholder to address any kind of project issues that we might uh come into or preemptively assign what we call risk management which are things that we know could hiccus up or maybe be a roadblock in this project and we want to identify them so that way they're at the forefront of our mind and that way we can keep an eye on them this is your general interface for your user as they're navigating this project list now before we move on i want to call out a few more things inside the interface over here you'll see that i actually have four kinds of projects i have what we call engineering to order or manufacture to order projects i have new product development and then i have this project placeholder called improvements each one of these types of projects has different requirements and follows a different workflow and a different process flow so this is actually giving acme audio that flexibility to make sure that they're capturing and organizing in the way that they actually need for the tasks that are at hand now when we are dealing with this and in this case we're going to talk about new product right new product development we can actually look at this in a number of ways the first you just saw which is your general interface but we can dive down a little bit deeper for example maybe i know that these uh six projects right here are projects that are at the top of the forefront uh i need to look at them and i need to have a better idea of how to get my my timing and my resources in line so one way to do that is to leverage what we call the project planning tool and like most tools in solidworks manage it's going to be a simple right mouse button click when i write mouse button click on the project plan it takes all those projects and it puts them in a nice clean easy to see gantt chart now this gantt chart can be organized by a lot of different ways in this example i'm going to organize this by year and let's take a look and see what kind of timing we have for the year that we're currently in 2021. now the benefit of this is as we drill down into each one of these projects it's actually now overlaying them and showing us the resources that are involved and responsible for the different items in this project plan now i can see right off the bat i'm fixing to create a brand new project and roland and jeremy and mike and travis appear to have a lot already on their plate that's overlapping so let's take a look at developing a brand new project to initiate a new product and make sure we put this out in the future so that way we can actually achieve our goal of when we want this project to be completed we'll go ahead and get out of our project planning view and we're going to come back to our main interface and let's initiate a new product introduction process to do that i'm going to come over here i'm going to find my npi or new product introduction process and we'll simply right click and choose new now when we do this there are some required information that we must put into the system in order for the project to hit that first phase or what a lot of people call a gate now all this information is supplementary information that is generally going to be coming from the customer project manager or maybe sales person who is heading this project up in this case we're going to be developing a new suntracker system for 2022 model pontoons this is going to start off in the it's a new concept so it's going to start off in a new concept phase the target price for this unit is going to be 650 and we'd like to see a first year sales goal of a thousand units we're going to tell the system that this is going to end up being a project so yes we want to create a project and the project type is going to be a standard project i'll talk more about that here in a little bit when we get into the planning phase we need to assign different department leads who are going to essentially inherit the task for those departments in this case we'll start off with me as the project manager i will also be the project lead the engineering lead for this project is going to be my co-worker travis and the manufacturing lead is going to be my other co-worker brian now these last two inputs are going to control how this process plan is actually laid out so this is going to be a competitive market project and we want to make sure that we're attaching all the required documents now everything that you see right here is a hundred percent customizable so if you say roland we need to add or remove or we don't do those types of things that's perfectly fine this is just capturing the information that acne audio needs for the project once we do that we're going to go ahead and save that and it's going to initiate that original process plan now a few things happen right now the first thing that happened is a first task actually automatically got generated so for every project that acme audio does they have to have this initial concept sheet this concept sheet is where we sit down with the customer who's requesting the unit or might we might be sitting down with somebody from our distribute distribution group or maybe the sales group that's outlining the specific things that they want to see in this product on top of that we're going to see what we call our history map now what this history map is doing is this is outlining our roadmap to how this project is going to get completed now a lot of times people call these phases or gates that have to happen now this isn't just involving creating files creating solidworks models or creating solidworks drawings this is encompassing everything that has to happen so that way we can hit full production for this unit and hopefully sell a whole bunch of them and make a bunch of money in it for at me there's actually six things that happen the first thing is our planning and our requirements gathering this is our market analysis our competitor assessment our product planning that's happening between our project manager and our sales team and sometimes with the actual customer that's requesting the unit once we have all that information and we deem this being a project that we're going to go ahead and take on we're going to pass that into our first gate which is our concept development phase this is where our technical teams are getting our technical requirements we might be collecting suppliers and seeing how we're going to allocate whether we're going to be making the product in-house or outsourcing and developing our cost for this actual unit until all of these actions happen we actually don't start producing models these are things that happen outside of our engineering team once this first gate has been accomplished we're going to navigate over into our product design phase and this is where we're going to start building actual parts prototypes doing the modeling doing the engineering and doing the testing of this product once we've signed off on the prototype phase and the product design phase we then get ready for what we call pre-production phase the pre-production is where we're going to ramp up into full production manufacturing and assembly once we've gone through our pre-production phase and we've passed all of our first article and keeps inspections and vetted out the process that we're going to be using to mass manufacture this then we go into full production and then finally we've finished our project now for new products all of these phases have to happen but in some cases we have an express route now what is acme using with this express route well for them a lot of the times they all have an existing unit that they're going to tweak just a little bit and now offer it as a new unit to the customer so in those circumstances they don't have to go through these first three phases we call that an express project which goes straight into pre-production and prepares us for that pre-production phase of getting all the tooling and getting our full production information ready to go so this is actually getting all of our organization on board and get assigning them tasks as we progress through this project now let's go ahead and assume that this project is ready to go so the first thing we have to do is we have to mark our task as complete so that way we can hit that next phase to do that i'm going to simply right click on this task i'm actually one of the task owners and persons responsible for doing this and we're going to go ahead and assume that we have this completed so we'll mark that as complete and then we'll hit save once i've done that i'm now ready to go into phase one of the project so we have completed our first phase of this project and we'll go ahead and send this to the next stage so that way the rest of our team can now get their work assigned to them now that i have that if we're back here at our main interface we can see all that information directly from our dashboard right here we can see our history we can see our completed task and the next thing i want to show you is the actual project that got created off of this process that project is linked directly to this process and essentially i'm using just a automatic numbering scheme to number all my prod all my projects and process processes let's navigate to that and go ahead and start preparing this for the next phase in our project now once i navigate to this you're going to see again the same interface we were just looking at when we started this demonstration now what is different is that i have not fully completed all of the other supplementary information to get this project ready for the next phase so let's go ahead and do that now and the way that i'm going to do that is i'm going to simply open up my project i'm going to take ownership of it so that way i can add some supplementary information in here and we're going to go ahead and start filling out all of our market research and all of the the technical things that we know about this project right now the first thing is is in order to get a good idea of how much resources we need we're going to estimate that this project is going to take us about 300 hours we need to give it a capital budget so for the new tooling we're going to say right now we're estimating about forty five thousand dollars in utooling we're going to give it a due date we'd really like to see this project ready for um the summer so we'll say that the due date is going to be the first of may we're starting on this project we know that we have some projects already in the pipeline so we're actually going to start this project at the first part of april and then we'll go ahead and hit save now all this information is giving everybody in my organization access to now the same info prior to manage the way that acme audio was doing this was a combination of excel sheets and emails and production meetings now we know we're not going to get rid of production meetings but now we're giving everybody access to the same information the next thing we want to do is we want to actually lay out this process plan for this project so we're going to go into that planning phase and this is where all the tasks are going to get assigned and the deliverables will start getting created now you can always come in here and add a plan one item at a time but what we're actually going to leverage is we're going to leverage a template now acme audio does a lot of different projects and so for each different project type that they do whether it's a new product introduction or capital improvement project or maybe it's just a an idea that they came up with their own they already have a pre-planned phase for for those types of activities in this example i'm going to use the project template for new product introduction so i'm going to choose my template i'm going to choose the start date of this project so again we're going to start this at the first part of march and then we'll go ahead and hit apply once i apply this it is now building my gantt chart and building my process flow for my organization what happens is is for each phase of this design of this project we are now getting a timeline and along with that timeline there are some default tasks that we know had to happen for every project let's start off with the design phase if i click on the design phase we've allocated a little over three weeks about 88 hours of design time to accomplish this now there's three tasks that need to happen and we know that for every new product these three tasks always have to happen and this is our starting point for managing our resources those 3d tasks are to produce 3d models generate the shipping bill material and do all the fea and analysis work on all key components now we're going to come back to these tasks and show you how to add new ones and show how and actually complete some of these but before we do that in this example we actually need to do a little tweaking to our project plan so solidworks manage provides you good flexibility on tweaking the plan as you go in this case this this unit is not going to be something that we so we're going to change our installation from our installation to review and testing we also need to add another portion in the project so we're going to come up here and hit add it's going to add me a new bar right here for my project and this is going to be our wrap up and final review now this isn't a a main stage in the project this is actually a substage so we have flexibility and to change and tweak our project plan in this case i'm going to go ahead and bump this up and i'm going to indent this so that way this isn't actually an item that's going to happen in our review and testing now what's neat about this is as it develops this gantt chart it's actually applying our resources that are responsible for each phase of our project plan and it's calculating any kind of critical path in this case our critical path is what that means to you is that before the next phase can take place the previous phase needs to be completed the benefit of this is say we do need to push this out it's going to auto adjust our process plan and push out the supplementary items that are after the essentially the item that's running a little bit behind schedule so this process plan is totally flexible and configurable to what acme audio needed now let's go back over here to the design phase in this unit we actually need one more task that we're missing and in this example we need to develop a new pc board and a new electrical harness for this unit we currently don't have something that we can leverage so we're going to right click and we're going to say new task we're going to give this task a name we're going to say develop new board and harness now we want to sign this i'm definitely not the electrical engineer so we want to assign this to somebody more appropriate in this case i'm going to remove myself as the owner and we're going to assign this to one of our electrical engineers jeremy browning i can also include any notes or any supplementary information that he might need and i can also tell him when i want this task to be completed by in this example we're going to say this is good and we're going to go ahead and save and close that once i do we see a new item in our project plan assigned to mr browning with our original start date and our due date of march 2nd now another way to look at task is to leverage what we call the task board and now when we're looking at the task board this is probably one of my favorite ways to organize my project the first thing i like to do is i like to look at this by stage right so this gives me visibility of what's going on at what stage now i can see at in my design phase here's the four tasks now i noticed on my tech pubs i don't currently have anybody assigned to actually create our instruction manuals so let's go ahead and add that as a task we're going to say create interactive instruction manual for website we're going to assign this to somebody more appropriate not myself this example we're going to go ahead and give this to mr mike and then we're going to save and close it now the benefit of this task board is this gives you one a global view of all the tasks and at what stage they need to be completed but along with that it lets you manipulate this task board so in this case this actually needs to happen at the top in the technical publication outline now the next way that i like to look at this is by priority so as i generate tasks they're not all equal some tasks and some things need to happen before others and some end up being very urgent so in this case our bill of materials creation that's really a high priority action our create training plan that's something that can happen a little bit later on in the project it's going to be a low priority action item creating interactive instruction for website although it's something we definitely need to do that's really a low priority item now what is one of our high priority items that might need to happen almost immediately well developing the new board in the harness is going to control a lot of our design information for the housing and for our speaker system so that actually needs to happen almost immediately so i'm going to go ahead and classify that as urgent now once i close out of this task board as i'm reorganizing and making sure that everybody has the things that they need to be doing it's actually managing this in the background and setting up all of our notifications for our system you'll notice now that this task called develop new board and harness has been assigned to red and mr browning when he logs in is going to be getting a notification what i like to do now is i'm going to log out of the system as myself and i'm going to go ahead and log into the system as jeremy and let's see what's going to happen so i've instigated another session of manage and i'm going to go ahead and log in as mr browning now when i do almost immediately we're going to be getting some very valuable information and that information is is hey you have urgent tasks that are your inbox this was a huge benefit benefit for acme audio because there was really no true way to make sure things were getting prioritized correctly without having some sort of central database to capture all this when mr browning logs in he's going to see that same user interface he's going to see his task here at the right it's highlighted in red very visual tracking and he can go ahead and navigate over here to the project that that task is associated with now unbeknownst to us mr browning has actually already developed the circuit board and the harness for this electrical so all what he really needs to do is add it into this project as a deliverable and go ahead and mark the task as complete so the first thing he does is he checks this out he's going to come over here to our process plan called design it's going to go to project deliverables and he's going to add this in as a deliverable now when he does i want to point out something here manage has the ability to actually connect to other systems and other database in this case he's actually connected to his pdm vault and the pdm vault he's going to filter this out by assemblies and find the actual board that he's already designed in preparation for this project once he does once he finds that board he's going to go ahead and add this in making sure that he is logged into pdm as himself and he'll close this down now what is the benefit of this the benefit of this is the fact that this is now a project deliverable that is looking at our pdm ball and is now tied to this project since he has this done he's going to mark this task as complete save his work and move on to the next thing in the system now we'll close down our session as mr jeremy browning we'll come back over here into my original interface and let's go ahead and take a look at this project when i go look at my process plan i can tell manage to go ahead and update all of my information now what you're going to see is is since mr browning finished his project and finished his task and updated the pc board where it's going to give us a real-time look now as the project manager of those tasks that he's completed we can see that this project this task for the board is a marked as a hundred percent and if we come up here to our design phase we can see that our gantt chart is now updated in real time it's now ten percent complete because we have a portion of the design phase ready to go now as being the owner of this how can i go ahead and mark these things as complete also well you have a few different ways to to mark a task complete one is if you know it's complete by simply right clicking at it we can choose mark as complete in this case i'm not quite done with this task but i want to go ahead and let everybody in the organization know that i've been working on it and i'm almost there so i'm going to log some time into this project when i do that it's going to go ahead and update that status bar now as different users and as different people and different parts of our organization are updating their tasks and updating their project deliverables we'll see our gantt chart update in real time so now i can see that we're 75 percent done with that design phase now the last few things that i want to show you in this project as we wrap this up is what we call project issues and risk management these are essentially special objects that allow us to identify things right identify either an issue or a risk that we can keep our our eye on as we navigate through the system to do this we're going to go ahead and hit new and we're going to create a new issue the issue we've identified is uh we are short on material from vendor need more plastic resources now like anything else this is creating an object in our system we can assign this to a responsible person for example maybe somebody in our management team we can assign a task to this that task might be um find new vendor for to source material out and we can attach any related files this might be the actual material sheet for the material that we're missing in a nutshell this could be any kind of issue that you've come across in the phases of this project the benefit of this is that now we have a one-stop shop where all these issues are identified currently what acme audio was doing is they had production meetings every day which is all fine and dandy but everybody would bring in what their issue were and then when everybody left or or went back to their own little battle stations there was no way to see what was happening along with these issues on top of that we can identify things that might be risk along the life cycle of this project so the benefit of a risk is this gives the ability to actually classify the risk as higher or lower so one risk that we we see is our laser machine has been unreliable we can give this a probability of failure not very high but it has happened the impact of failure though is a very high value meaning if it fails this is really going to set our project back now as we wrap up our demonstration let's look at how we can actually take this and digest this in a more efficient manner obviously there's a lot more things that need to happen in this project to finish it out but i don't want to eat up all of our time on just working on this project many more tasks need to be accomplished and many more things need to happen in order for that to hit that final completed phase in our process flow but what i'd really like to do is take a look at how can we digest all this information so the first thing that we're going to look at is from an end user standpoint we can identify any of our dashboards and customize these to things that we need for example i have a quick dashboard that's going to show me any project issues so i can come in here and as i go through my day i can make sure that there's nothing that's been assigned to me from a management perspective we can identify things that are high risk values so right here i can filter out any risk that is high higher than say a value of 10. it's going to go ahead and outline that in red and put it at the top of my list i can see my motor suppliers backlog motor deliveries need to be delayed this could instigate me to update my project plan or maybe find a new motor vendor now one of my favorite ways to die to digest information is to leverage what we call reports now you can have a report on a project you can have a report on a process you have a report on pretty much anything and all of our reports are totally in 100 customizable and configurable the way that we access a report is by simply right-clicking on an object and telling the system to go ahead and run the report in this this is a way that we can share this information with some of our upper-level ceo management team this gives us an idea and gives us a printout that we can then distribute and disseminate ingly this gives us the status of all of our project stages current tasks the status of those tasks and the respective due date along with that in our project deliverables this is giving us the deliverables for that project along with our estimated cost start date and due date now another way to digest information is to leverage what we call a dashboard now the dashboards are the most common way that all users are getting in and getting their information of what they need to be doing or what the status of the union might be like now up here in our home page we have our dashboard we have a few different dashboards the first one that i'm i generally look at the most is our projects dashboard as a project manager this gives me an idea of what's going on in my organization and it gives me a real-time view of where we at and across all of our projects now the benefit of this is this isn't just a static dashboard this is actually automatically refreshing and it's giving me the ability to interact with this dashboard for example i'm most concerned with things that are in progress or currently not yet started as i interact with this you're going to see that this dashboard is actually updating i want to look at things that are specifically assigned to me and i want to sort these tasks out across all these projects this is giving me a real-time look across anything that i've currently started or not started and that i am the project management project manager for now one of the dashboards that i use very frequently is this pdm content this dashboard is actually grabbing information that is not even inside solidworks manage this is grabbing information outside of manage that is actually in our vault and it's organizing it across the different stages of the workflow and the different stages of the projects now the last dashboard we're going to look at is our npi dashboard this is a dashboard that is organizing our introduction of new products or new designs into our organization this gives me a nice visual of the new product and product revenue for the year i use this most when i'm going into my management meetings and giving an overview of what we have in store for the next year and years to come now that wraps up the demonstration of our project management for acme audio so let's wrap up today's session and then we'll kick it back over to our moderator and maybe have a little q a now acme audio what did we just look at what are they doing they're using solidworks manage to do all project management and stay ahead of the schedule now what you saw today is just the tip of the iceberg in a short webinar session like this this is to educate you on the product on the solution and give you a real life example of how that solution looks if you find yourself saying hey i do something very similar hey you know we don't do the exact thing but we do something that looks like that what i would encourage you to do is to reach out to us and let's set up a deeper look into your process and maybe do an audit or a walkthrough of what you're currently doing in your organization now this is just the beginning of this six part series if you haven't done so already make sure that you sign up for session two where we're going to be looking at our pcb and our harder schematic design now if you're telling yourself hey roland i'm not an electrical engineer that's okay you still want to come in because what we're going to look at is we're going to pick up where we left off in our task of developing these prop these two things but we also want to look at the deliverable and how our electrical team is working with our mechanical team and then the output that they give to the rest of our organization [Music] [Music] you