Feature: Improved Customer Visibility

December 7, 2024

We’re pleased to announce that as of Dec. 5th, we’ve integrated a few new features to our custom Alpaca software solution to better meet the needs of our customer. Like all of our features, these came from observing the evolving business landscape and paying attention to how our customers interact with us and our products.

Initially, our builds were very bespoke, volumes were quite low, and shipments typically went directly to engineering contacts within customer offices. We were in close communications with our customer contacts and there was rarely any confusion about where a harness was. As volumes grew, a few things changed:

• Many individual contributors on customer engineering and manufacturing teams need to know the build status of a large number of harnesses on a purchase order.
• Harnesses are now typically received through a customer receiving process, instead of going directly to an engineer’s desk.
• Packing lists and proof of delivery have become crucial to streamlining the accounts payable process for our customers.

New Features in Alpaca

To address these changes, we implemented some cool new tricks:

• Automated Shipment Emails: Customers will now receive an automated email from our Alpaca server providing the tracking number and packing list for each shipment. We can add watchers to a distribution list at the PO level, so if multiple teams such as engineering, manufacturing, quality, and accounting all need this information, they can easily be added. If you have an open PO with us and would like to add more members of your team to the distro list, just email us and let us know!
• Batched Status Display: We’ve generated a few new ways of communicating build status information depending on the level of detail needed. The first is a simple batched status display which communicates which harnesses have been completed, which are in work, and any which are currently blocked. This is useful for customers requesting periodic updates for larger builds.
• Detailed Individual Harness Display: We’ve added a more granular view at the individual harness level which clearly communicates the causes of any blockages, expected ship dates, and QA status. This is especially convenient for smaller builds or for builds where the first articles need regular updates.

Implementation and Feedback

Implementing each of these changes showcased the power of our database-driven manufacturing system. Since all of the data is already there, generating new displays to easily meet changing customer communication needs is simply a matter of writing the right database query.

As always, your feedback is important – if there are changes to our communications or even simple things that would make it easier to receive or process communications from us, let us know!