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What's in motion stays in motion. Or does it?
Newton’s law tells us that a body in motion will stay in motion and a body at rest will stay at rest unless there’s an outside force applied. That...
3 min read
Names are important. A name can make or break you. A well-chosen name for a product or a company can be the difference between being memorable and forgotten. The same can often be said for people. You will sometimes hear the phrase “that’s a strong name” for a baby or “a cute name” for a kitten.
Many cultures believe that a name is so important that a child has a naming ceremony. Eastern Orthodoxy does this on their 8th day of life. Mormons on the first Sunday of the month after they are born. Hindus celebrate it on the 12th day. I even found resources on Wiccan and Druids.
Names are important.
There’s a history behind many names and whole cultures trace people back to the historical significance of the name they’ve been given. Quantum™ is no different for us. It represents our 5th generation product platform. (I’m going to take a minute here to say that most software companies don’t pump out 3 or 4 written from the ground up as a different tool. Our team is spectacular at what they do and has been able to deliver 4 out of 5 of those platforms to the manufacturing community. And, yes, we did learn a lot from that one failure. RIP, e-binder.)
As we were building it and before it came to market, we referred to this most recent generation as K2. We knew we were climbing a mountain writing yet another generation of manufacturing software tools starting with code line 1 and so we named it appropriately. K2 is lesser known but more difficult to climb than Everest. It was our way of referencing what we were going to encounter as we started.
Our prior platform was a drop-down menu approach to manufacturing. The dispatching / order management area and the shop floor area were both separate. We did not have scheduling (Quantum now has 4 different scheduling tools) and we kept a Bill of Materials (BOM) but left inventory "management” to their ERP.
Quantum was going to be different for us. We were moving from a menu-based approach (in Microsoft vernacular, this was File / Open) to a workflow-based system. We understood that the key ingredient to a well-run manufacturing facility was data. You can have a 1,000- or a 10-person facility; in either case, if you lack data, you’re out of control. And, based on what I’ve seen in our 26 years in business, the amount of mess for the two is not very different. Scale is different, but not the trouble or the costs involved in lack of control with lack of data.
“In physics, a quantum is the minimum amount of any physical entity involved in a transaction.”Quantum often refers to the smallest amount of something. The word quantum (or, for us, Quantum) comes originally from Latin. (Doesn’t everything?) It meant “how much” and we do believe that Quantum tells you how much of everything you have – time, money, people, orders, inventory, data. You name it, we can tell you how much you have of it using Quantum.
So when we went to look for the right product name for our platform, K2, we leaned into the data element that we were working on and picked a word that, to us, symbolized the smallest amount of something you needed to make it right.
Over the course of time, we’ve leaned further into that and I’d argue that we did that from time to time without even knowing it. For instance, as we moved into and through COVID, we recast our product platform and how we sold it to dramatically reduce the price point so that manufacturers on the smaller side of the spectrum could afford it. I know that, over time, we’ll see further improvements to what we do. What I hope we never lose is the ability to focus on the smallest thing. The smallest thing usually counts. Whether that is a dollar for you or an hour or an order, we need to make sure we know the smallest thing that affects you the most.
Would you like to increase focus on certain elements of your production? Would you like to see how Quantum can help? Send us a message at info@cimx.com. Anxious to move forward faster? Ask for a Process Gap Analysis of your shop.
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