Necessity Is the MOM of Invention:
How Micro Depot Saves Trees, Time, and Crosstalk with Its MDI Management Operation System
By: Craig Zimmerman
Whatever happened to the future we were promised as kids? The gear-heads and speed-heads among us should be hitting Denny’s in their flying cars by now. The slobs should be sitting back and watching Rosie the Robot clean Tang off the carpet. And the administratively inclined should be keeping tabs on the rest of us without also having to administer ream after ream of dead-tree paper. But hey, at least we’ve got Mighty Putty, right? Best just to get used to disappointment.
Not so fast – you don’t get the winged car or the mech-maid, but you can do the paperless thing.
Norcross, Georgia-based Micro Depot, Inc. (www.mdi.us.com) has spent 20 years dealing with mountains of paper generated by a busy system integration and enterprise solutions business – not to mention the communication problems, project tracking inefficiencies, and suboptimal organization that pulp-and-ink seems to favor.
According to Jimmy Campbell, sales engineer at MDI, “Without organization, it’s really impossible to accomplish goals inline with your expectations. You may be able to finish a project, but it won’t be on time, it won’t be within the resource budget, it won’t be the quality or completeness of the original idea.” That can be a problem, especially when one of your projects is becoming ISO 9001: 2008 certified. But in this case, the necessity of dealing with the approximately 9,001 details of the ISO documentation process – plus serving an ever-growing client base with the efficiency MDI is known for – led to the invention of MDI Management Operation System (MOMS).
MDI Management Operation System (MOMS) was born of a need to foster greater transparency and data availability, both in response to business demands and the demands of ISO 9001:2008 certification. Because it evolved during MDI’s certification efforts, MDI Management Operation System (MOMS) incorporates the same rigorous standards it was originally designed to help MDI meet.
“We have a really great quality control team who focused their efforts on becoming ISO 9001:2008 certified,” Jimmy says. “The same team was behind our manufacturing process flow. Their input was considered at every stage of MDI Management Operation System (MOMS)’ evolution. During our pre-assessment it became clear our auditing counselors were impressed with our management software and felt we had a very strong chance of passing. After the initial pass over our system, we modified it to make sure we had every corner of the ISO 9001 requirement covered. In our very first formal audit, we passed and received some glowing feedback about the completeness of the software we had developed.”
Prior to MDI Management Operation System (MOMS), every department of MDI used its own processes and managed its own workflow. For awhile, the arrangement worked fine. As the company grew, though, it was apparent that this balkanized system would become unmanageable, especially when it came to the ISO 9001 requirements.
But now, Jimmy says, “We are secure in the knowledge that our company can scale easily without sacrificing control or quality. Quality plays a big part in the entire motivation for that project, as all of our customers are focused 100% on quality.”
And thanks in part to MDI Management Operation System (MOMS), that level of quality graces every part of MDI’s operations. “We essentially moved all of our established system integration, purchasing, inventory, sales, and organizational processes into an internal database-driven application,” Jimmy says. “Since then, we have greatly built on the platform, and it has matured to a point where our entire company is transparent, paperless, and digitized. We can track a customer’s product from a serial number down to a proposal or a component or the engineer who designed it.”
Soon, Everybody Can Have the Cool MOM
Although MDI Management Operation System (MOMS) was purpose-built to digitize and streamline MDI’s operations, it’s become such a useful tool that no one at MDI wants to keep it to themselves.
“Eventually, each department’s module grew so complete that we were communicating through it, abolishing paper, simplifying tasks,” Jimmy says. “Now we’re really focusing on packaging it and polishing its features so other organizations can enjoy the same automation.”
“Personally, as a sales engineer,” Jimmy continues, “I make heavy use of the scheduling module, which helps me stay organized, helps my managers understand what I’m working on, and allows us all to collaborate on projects or smaller tasks. I also make use of our sales module, which allows me to build a computer configuration or a solution, such as a full rack system, and then package it up into a PDF proposal for one or more customers.”
When customers are ready to order, they simply generate a purchase order based on the proposal. Once the purchase order is approved, it’s then fed into MDI’s production and scheduling departments. According to Jimmy, “I could take it to the final stages of delivery and beyond, but I think it demonstrates the ideology behind MDI Management Operation System (MOMS) very well: eliminate redundancy and paper, maintain records, and ‘package’ processes as much as possible.”
At MDI, MOMS runs on an open source Linux platform using Apache, PHP, and MySQL for the heavy lifting and AJAX for a more fluid user experience. Although MDI Management Operation System (MOMS) isn’t open sourced, itself, its engineers have designed it to fit comfortably into free and open source environments.
“Part of what we are working on now is full portability,” Jimmy says. “We’d like to provide customers the option to acquire a full turnkey MDI Management Operation System (MOMS) installation from us as a hardware platform or as a software package they can install into existing production environments, such as Oracle. We’ve since rolled it out onto a dedicated server which is accessible through the Internet via a secure tunnel, and we routinely perform updates, monitor vulnerabilities, and follow industry best practices. Customer privacy and security are a major focus since we’ve taken it online and for the eventual OEM release.”
While management operations systems have traditionally come with steep learning curves, the upcoming OEM version of MDI Management Operation System (MOMS) delivers much of the same power without all the perplexity.
“When we first endeavored to make MDI Management Operation System (MOMS) available as a discrete product, we reviewed a lot of other options out there,” Jimmy says. “We reviewed products that have been around for 10 to 20 years or longer in the health care and manufacturing industries. We found that there are truly some incredible systems out there with a much broader scope than we initially set out to cover. But a lot of our partners who are looking at our proposed package are just excited at how complete it is without such a dramatic degree of complexity.” And with the dramatic cost – though many of the packages Jimmy mentions can be had for a price in the six-figure range, MDI plans to make MDI Management Operation System (MOMS) affordable for small to mid-sized businesses.
No Paper. No Print. No Problem.
Like most innovations we dreamed about when we were kids, flying cars and Tang-cleaning robots are really just symbols for something greater – freedom. The same goes for the paper-free office. While saving trees is a virtue in itself, what we’re really talking about here is unfettered communication – and by extension, unfettered business.
“Going paperless just makes sense,” Jimmy says. Now, with MDI Management Operation System in place, “We have these robust systems that can push information across time zones in milliseconds, replicate it across geographic borders, deliver it to your pocket during lunch – there doesn’t need to be an intermediate step. And if that’s not enough, it’s responsible and frugal.”
“Companies are always struggling to keep their departments communicating,” Jimmy concludes. “Divisions have a tendency to become isolated or communicate only among a handful of managers. But transparency has benefits everywhere – when people at every level understand the rationale behind a decision or a project, they’re going to be making their own informed decisions, sharing relevant information, and even participating in the creative process. Ultimately, when your people see where an idea is going, you get a better product.”
Maybe even – someday – a flying car.
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