Our shop is transitioning from using moziak to using microvellum. The engineering portion of microvellum is much better. But where moizak shines is with their paperless shop application. Our company was sold on microvellum being able to do everything mozaik can. The paperless shop app can be replaced by using the HTML reports, but these are honestly not very good compared to the moziak application and requires work arounds that takes away from the whole microvellum experience and add a lot of extra work to our workflow. 

I would like to see microvellum come out with a stand alone application, like the moziak paperless shop, that allows a shop worker to view each product in 3d and print labels and see information such as hardware and door sizes. There is already the microvellum production software. What we are wanting could even be an added feature to that program. This would also help microvellum compete with programs like moziak, that do offer these products.

The HMTL reports don't work as we would like them to and are full of work arounds. From some of the training videos I have heard the phrase "Microvellum streamline's the way you work", but this aspect is not streamlined in any way.

I cannot print 1 label per product. I can only do all products per work order. We want 1 work order per project. Unless it's phased. Other shops I have worked for do small batches of specific rooms, but that will not work for us. With Large projects that means keeping track of huge lists of labels, which is not very practical. There are many reasons why I would not want to print all at once or want just 1 at a time. Parts are missing so the cabinet cannot be made now and needs to be caught up later. We dropped the cabinet so just need to remake the 1. A whole room has a different colour laminate that was not shipped yet so that room cannot be made yet. Another project has a tight timeline and has to be pushed ahead of the one currently being assembled. I could go on, but the point is that printing every label at once does not work for the way our production is setup.

Another issue we have with the HTML reports is that I cannot view the product in 3d from the report. We can create a 3d dwf file that the tablet can then download and open in another program such as autodesk design review. I would like to just use 1 program, not multiple. Especially in the shop where I don't want them wasting time opening programs. Also the design review is awful on a tablet, it's definitely meant for a computer with a keyboard and mouse. To make the 3d dwf we need to use draw product in new drawing function and have it call a lisp routine to create all the necessary files. With the bricscad version of toolbox, you can only do 1 at a time or it crashes. Even if you can do all products, it takes a long time to do this process. All of this is just  extra work that can be forgotten and should not be required. As soon as you add another step for the human to do you create the possibility for the human to forget, which can cause confusion or mistakes which costs the company money. That's why we invest in software to automate tasks like this. I would like to just process a workorder and have the products viewable from the tablet, just as we can do with the nested sheets with microvellum production. 

Maybe I'm missing something, but the way we use HTML reports is how our trainer has instructed us to. He has said this is what we need to do to achieve what we want. Maybe someone can let me know of a better way. But i think it would be a good idea if there was a program like the one moziak has, instead of using the HTML reports that don't work very well. I don't mean for this post to sound like venting, I just wanted to be very specific in what we are looking for and the challenges we are currently facing with microvellum. I wonder if other companies are facing the same challenges and would like a similar product to the moziak paperless shop application.