Genesis
Start it up
Way back in 2004, I started Creative Conners as a basement-sized manufacturing company making automation equipment. Our first product lineup consisted mostly of control electronics. So I spent my days soldering circuit boards and wiring up electrical panels. Well, to be more accurate, I spent a surprisingly small percentage of time building products when I wasn’t busy marketing, selling, purchasing, packing, and shipping.
The Purchasing Problem
Each day it was tougher and tougher to squeeze in the myriad of responsibilities before the clock had run out. As sales started coming in, the relief of some revenue was quickly overshadowed by the stress of tracking inventory, purchasing parts, receiving purchase orders, building products, and keeping the customers’ orders rolling out the door on time.
Every product in our lineup required dozens of components. The part count was different for each bill of materials, and the purchase quantity varied too. Resistors were bought in bags of 100 or 1000. Chips were bought in tubes of 10. Screws were bought in boxes of 50 or 100. How many did I buy last time? How many do I need now? How do I keep track of all this? Argh!
Spreadsheets, Now I Have Two Problems
Naturally, I grabbed a spreadsheet and started chucking in the data. Each product had a spreadsheet for the bill of materials. A separate spreadsheet tracked component inventory on the shelf. When we made a sale I could come up with a list of the parts I needed to buy to build the order, through a Rube Goldberg linkage of macros and lookups. Then, manually keep updating the inventory count when parts came in and again after parts were used up in production.
It didn’t take long before I sorta dreaded sales because I knew it meant I’d be spending a day in Excel running my digital abacus. That was no good, I wanted us to suck in sales as fast as we could, chew ‘em up and spit out products (in a careful, precise way).
Saving the Day, Literally
What I wanted was a magic button. When it was time to order up parts from vendors, I wanted to hit a big magic button that would instantly figure out what I needed to buy from each vendor so I could build the open sales. No more spreadsheets, no more hours of tabulation, no more counting parts. Replace all that with one big magic button to give me back valuable hours of my day. So I built that button.
By 2005, I had coded the first version of Off The Shelf. It’s primary function back then was to automatically create purchase orders and track shelf inventory. Purchasing was reduced from an all-day affair to a few minutes. Wow! That was a huge step! The software was like my operations assistant working alongside me keeping our shelves stocked and orders tracked.
Here’s a glimpse at that now ancient interface:
The 2005 Version
The interface today looks quite a bit more friendly:
The 2020 Version
We’ve added tons of useful feature since those early days. And, of course, it’s now a small team of us working on the software (not just me in a basement workshop). But, our focus remains the same: buy back time for you. Manufacturing should be about making great products and delivering them to customers. We want Off The Shelf to be the silent partner in your operation, dutifully tallying inventory and timesheets and orders so you have more time to do the real work: make something amazing!