Alan Agemy
Ginosko Development Company has been delivering high-quality residential projects for over 20 years with over $560M in capitalized value to date and many projects in our pipeline. The next step to accelerate our business was to launch Ginosko Modular, our prefab business tailored towards leveraging offsite construction and factory-based production, to deliver multi-family housing faster and more cost-effectively while maintaining our quality.
As a Controller responsible for selecting our manufacturing platform and ERP. I leveraged my extensive experience in various financial roles throughout my career to evaluate various types of manufacturing software including and ultimately selected Offsight as the best-of-breed manufacturing software for our modular construction process.
From this perspective, I will outline why we ultimately decided on Offsight as the perfect fit for our prefab business.
Built For the Prefab and Modular Industry
As we began our search for manufacturing software, it became clear early on that Offsight’s capabilities were uniquely tailored to our needs as a prefab and modular manufacturer. Offsight’s platform was built for offsite construction and provides easy-to-use manufacturing workflows that can be created and adapted for each project and product type. In this manner, Offsight is truly a project manufacturing solution for customers who design for manufacturing assembly and experience changes to their manufacturing workflow and process from project to project.
As a financial controller and someone with a traditional financial background, I found this a unique differentiator when evaluating other solutions. It became even more apparent to our team that Offsight was the right solution when we involved the production and manufacturing operations team members in our evaluation. By leveraging Offsight software, which was designed for our industry and our project manufacturing process, we would not only make our lives easier during implementation but also as we scaled production.
Offsight’s mobile functionality was also unique as they tied material consumption and labor costs to specific products or projects leveraging QR codes and mobile scanning features. From the perspective of a controller, this ensured that material costs and labor costs data were highly accurate and could be used as estimate data for future projects. We found this to be a big gap that many traditional manufacturing systems failed to address because they were not built for the industry and made it very difficult for us to collect materials and labor data from the factory floor.
Easy to use, Dedicated Support, Seamless to Scale
Another key differentiator was Offsight’s dedicated support. Offsight assigned a dedicated solutions engineering manager to our account with established industry experience. Their implementation manager understood our process and with his collective knowledge of best practices was able to easily help build out our production, materials, and labor workflows. Many traditional manufacturing systems we were evaluating fell short in this regard as they had very limited implementation resources and the assigned personnel lacked expertise in the prefab and modular industry.
Once we went live with Offsight, our assigned solutions engineering manager continued to provide dedicated support and helped us build out our manufacturing workflows in Offsight as we scaled and launched new production lines. They also provided hands-on training to all our operators and team leads on the floor and paired with Offsight’s intuitive mobile app and user interface, we were able to quickly get started using the software.
The streamlined onboarding and training were critical as I could ensure that operators were recording their clock-ins and clock-outs correctly for accurate labor tracking and that materials were being consumed in real-time at each workstation for accurate work-in-process (WIP) reporting. This ease of use in data collection is a major differentiating factor when evaluating competing solutions that promised a lot but ultimately fell short when it comes to real-world useability on the shop floor.
Robust Integrations and Connectivity
The final key takeaway in our evaluation that helped us decide on Offsight as the best solution was their robust cloud-based integrations with accounting software. Offsight provides real-time interactions for materials, labor, and production data from the floor and feeds this data to our Netsuite instance via a real-time API.
Since most financial controllers and CFOs find it very difficult to ensure that they get highly accurate production data from the floor, Offsght’s continuous synchronization and real-time updates is a game-changer. During implementation, Offsight’s product team helped integrate our account based on our custom Netsuite setup. Furthermore, Offsight provides continuous support and maintenance to ensure that any updates in Netsuite do not break the integration.