Hey everyone,
I wanted to share what I've been busy with at Dingwall for the last few months. It’s not a bass, but I'm quite proud of it.
We were trying to figure out how much labor actually goes into each instrument, and where do builds slow down? It's a hard thing to measure well. We'd been tracking time for each process, but capturing it cleanly on a busy floor is its own challenge — and if the data isn't clean, it's hard to trust what it tells you. For example, some processes require 30 seconds of work every 15 minutes for 2 hours, and if the tracking app isn’t easy enough to operate it’s tempting to just let it run for 2 hours which creates false data. Or when you’re working on a batch, you end up recording the full batch time for each individual part.
I realized that we are not likely to find an off the shelf solution and started thinking about a custom one. And once I start pulling on something like that, I don't really stop until it works — so I set out to build a tool that would make the tracking effortless enough that the data actually holds up. Plus I wanted to reconcile it with our production spreadsheet and reduce time spent on looking up things.
It turned into two parts: a mobile app for the people on the floor, and a dashboard for the people running the shop. Here's the tour.
The worker app
The goal was simple — an app that actually help workers, not one that gets in their way. Everything hangs off the serial number. Search it, tap it, and the whole build is right there.
Searchable SN cards with all the build info (configurable), a process selector and a timer. Pick what you're doing, hit start, hit stop. The time lands on that exact instrument.
Reference images and color mixing recipes for the paint department, right on the card. No more searching through several spreadsheets and notebooks.
Workers can attach their own photos to an instrument — reference shots, progress, anything worth keeping with the build.
Location of each body and neck with a short spec preview, so finding a part stops eating your morning.
Department tabs that track priority and highlight any SN that's been stuck for too long.
A full history on every card — everything that's been done on it, and by whom. It survives handoffs, a new phone, closing the card. Nothing lives only in someone's head anymore.
Timers that sync with the payroll app. Clock out for a break and every running timer pauses itself. Clock back in and they pick up.
Workers can send requests to each other — assembly needs cover plates, that kind of thing. It lands on the right person's screen as a card they can check off. A sticky note that can't get lost.
Quality checkpoints between departments. A part doesn't move on until it's signed off, so problems get caught at the handoff instead of three departments later.
Batch mode. When I seal 20 bodies in one 3-hour stretch it tracks them together and splits the time properly across each one, instead of pretending I spent 3 hours on each.
The dashboard
This is the part I really like. All that clean data from the floor flows into one place.
Shop Floor — live data from every department. What's running, who's on it, what's waiting.
Throughput analysis per department, so the bottlenecks stop being a matter of opinion.
Labor by spec — and this one is huge. It shows which specs, and which combinations of specs, take the longest and cause the most rework. That means you can finally charge properly for the time-consuming stuff instead of eating it.
Build labor estimator. Plug in an SN and get an estimated labor time for these exact specs — not a shop average, but a number built from how long these specific options on this specific model have actually taken in the past.
Reports, including the weird ones. If I want something specific — say, the average rework time on builds with a pastel color and a matte top coat over the last year — I can just ask for it and it pulls it from the database.
Scheduling. Managers can actually plan the work, it shows up on the worker's screen, and they can see whether it got done.
Automations — when a build is finished it can ping the right salesperson (the one whose customer it is), queue up a photoshoot, schedule the next bit of work. Or when a top needs bleaching I can set up a notification for myself so I can do it right away.
Neck relief history — the app prompts to measure relief at configured stages and the dashboard renders a graph
Wood inventory — this is the start of the full MRP system I’m planning. The system knows which specs consume which kinds of wood, so at the start of a new build it subtracts from the inventory, so we know when to order more wood
Why I'm telling you this
Partly because I'm proud of it, and you're the people I share things with. And partly because a few of you run shops. If you've got the same mess, I can build you something like this. Just reply.