Applications of BellHawk for Engineering Projects

BellHawk is used in Engineer-to-Order projects to track:

• The expenditure of labor to perform tasks such as engineering, purchasing, project management and quality control.
• The purchase and warehousing of materials for the project
• The consumption of materials, labor and equipment time in making custom machines, components or assemblies
• The production and testing of  custom machines, components and assemblies
• The packing and shipment of custom machines, components or assemblies to customer sites
• Expenditure of labor  and rental of assets for on-site installation, repair, and refurbishment
• Return of unused materials and assets from customer sites.

BellHawk tracks the status of each task in real-time, including tracking project inventory and assets, labor and equipment time expended, as well as the location and status of all deliverables for a project. This includes using a warehouse-on-wheels concept to track materials on service trucks as well as delivery and pickup from field sites. It also includes tracking the repair of equipment returned from the field and its return to service.

Examples of BellHawk engineering applications include the following projects:

• Custom antennas for the US DoD (Department of Defense)
• Custom motor generator sets for the DoD
• Piping systems for chemical processing plants
• Custom shredding equipment
• Architectural steel and aluminum for buildings
• Electronic systems for buildings
• Tracking the repair and refurbishment of avionics components

In each case, engineering produces a design that starts life as a set of CAD documents. From these documents a take-off list is produced which is used to procure all the needed raw materials. These materials are then machined, assembled, coated, and packed to a customer site along with fittings and documentation.

Some of the ways that BellHawk is able to assist in this process are:

1. Producing purchase orders from a take-off list imported as an Excel spreadsheet
2. Tracking the receipt of raw materials against these purchase orders.
3. Tracking materials designated for different projects and keeping them separate
4. Tracking the machining/production and inspection of components by piece mark that corresponds to the CAD drawings
5. Tracking assembly of components into assemblies, again with piece mark tracking
6. Tracking packing of components into bundles and boxing of fittings ready for shipment
7. Tracking assemblies, bundles, and boxes of fittings as they are loaded onto a truck/trailer for shipment to the customer site. This can be compared with the bills-of-materials derived from the CAD drawings.
8. Tracking labor and special machine center time and cost for project
9. Feeding cost data to ERP, accounting or project management system.
10. Maintaining materials traceability records from finished assemblies back to all the materials that went into them.

Some big benefits that BellHawk provides for engineering organizations involved in design-to-make projects are:

1. Ability to prove that parts were shipped to the customer site. This prevents losses due to having to ship replacement parts using expedited shipping at no-cost to the customer's installation crew.
2. Ability to automatically generate electronic traceability records for each assembly and component to give to the customer at the completion of the project. This can save a large amount of labor at the end of each project.
3. Ability for managers and supervisors to see electronically the progress of each part of a complex project. This can be supplemented by electronic alerts when any aspect of the project is falling behind.
4. Ability to capture the costs of materials, labor and specialized machine time for a project. This enables detailed analysis of how well the organization performed and also gives a basis for subsequent bid and proposal activities.
5. Ability to track materials purchased for individual projects and to keep them clearly separated. This can avoid problems with project audits by customers, especially on cost-plus and similar projects.
6. Ability to track and manage revisions to designs and to make sure that the correct revisions of components go into the correct revision of each assembly.

Please click here to learn more about: BellHawk Engineering Project Management Tools