How to Automate JobBOSS

Every part in the building belongs to a job number

Contract machining, fabrication, stamping: JobBOSS is shop management software for the businesses that make somebody else's part to somebody else's print, and it belongs to ECI Software Solutions. Since 2021 the version being sold has been JobBOSS2, built by combining JobBOSS with the E2 SHOP system ECI acquired along with Shoptech. Plenty of shops are still on the older one, and jobboss.com now points at ECI.

Whatever the version, the shape is the same. A quote becomes an order, the order becomes a job with a router of operations across work centers, material is bought against it, time is booked to it by the people running the machines, and at the end there is a number: what the job cost set against what it was quoted at.

That number is the business. A shop can be busy every day of the year and still lose money on the work it fought hardest to win.

A part sent out for plating disappears from the schedule

The awkward part is how much of a job happens somewhere else.

Parts go out for plating, heat treat, anodising or grinding, and the promised date lives on the vendor's website or in an email thread. Bar stock comes from a service center with its own portal. The customer, if it is an OEM or a tier one, posts new requests for quote, revised purchase orders and changed delivery schedules on a supplier portal and sends nobody an email about any of it. The finished box goes out with a tracking number somebody has to remember to check.

So a buyer, or more often the owner, spends the first hour of the day inside other companies' logins, writing dates down. Then opens JobBOSS and types them in. Then does it again tomorrow, because a date read on Tuesday is a rumour by Thursday.

JobBOSS

Outside processing treated as a real operation Parts away at the plater, the heat treater or the coater, chased on the vendor's own site so the traveler shows where they actually are.

Requests for quote nobody forwarded Customer procurement portals read each morning, so an RFQ posted on a Friday afternoon gets quoted rather than found after it closed.

Certificates filed before an auditor asks Mill certs and vendor approvals collected from each supplier's site and attached to the job while the paperwork is still easy to find.

JobBOSS reasons from time tickets and receipts

JobBOSS does the inside of the shop properly, and a shop that has not configured all of it should start there.

Scheduling comes two ways: a Planning Board you drag jobs around on, and a Whiteboard Scheduler for changing due dates and job order when a hot one lands. The data collection module puts real time and material against the job from a browser, a tablet or a phone, and job travelers and part labels carry bar codes so nobody is filling in a sheet for somebody else to type up later. Purchase orders generate automatically for job material and for parts that fall below stock levels. The quality module handles non-conformances, corrective and preventative actions and document control, tied to orders rather than a separate folder. Reporting sets estimate against actual while the job is still running.

All of it is driven by something the shop itself recorded: a time ticket, a receipt, a status change. Nothing in it can learn that the plater is four days behind, that the service center pushed the bar stock a fortnight, or that the customer loaded a revised print onto a portal on Friday afternoon.

The traveler can carry dates from outside the shop

A job number can record what you were told in March, or what is true this morning. The difference is whether anything in the shop is reading other companies' websites.

Every outside processing purchase order checked on the vendor's own site, with anything that slipped flagged against the jobs it holds up, so the operation behind it moves while there is still room to move it. Customer procurement portals read for the things nobody forwards: a new RFQ with a closing date, a revised purchase order, a delivery schedule that changed quantity. An RFQ found after it closed is a customer who quietly stops asking.

Mill test reports, certificates of conformance and vendor approval letters pulled from each supplier's site and filed against the job before an auditor asks for the folder. Freight followed to the customer's dock, so a late delivery is a call you make rather than one you take. Bar and plate prices set against what the quote assumed, because a shop quoting from last quarter's material cost gives margin away one job at a time.

The shop half of all this already lives in JobBOSS. This is the other half of the same job.

The dates can arrive at the shop instead

It is not laziness that stops this happening. Reading eleven websites is the least interesting hour of anyone's week, and it loses every time to a customer at the counter.

WebRun is an agent that works a real Chrome browser, signed in as you. It opens the plater's site, the service center, the customer's supplier portal or the carrier, reads what is there, and either writes it against the JobBOSS job or hands you the list.

Nothing has to be integrated first, because a heat treater with twelve employees is never going to publish an API. It runs on your schedule in your own private environment, you can watch a run and stop it, and anything going to a customer is drafted and waits.

The workflows below are already built, and each one names what it opens.