Shop floor management with improved capabilities is an important component of the manufacturing industry. This makes it vital for manufacturers to have centralized systems and the best ERP software is the ideal choice in this regard.
The main purpose of shop floor management is to increase and sustain the production quality and efficiency. Today’s rising trend of digitization calls for identifying the improvement potentials of all manufacturing operations with focus on managing the shop floor. Fully optimized shop floor gives the managers more time to utilize in real management tasks.
Your choice of an ERP solution significantly affects the flow of information at every point. Hence, for better shop floor management, centralized information is a key feature that helps run your manufacturing operations smoothly and efficiently.
Let’s take a look how you can manage and monitor your shop floor in a better way using a manufacturing ERP.
Improved Turnaround Time:
Quick turnaround of finished products largely depends on outstanding shop floor management. With an integrated ERP, you can not only streamline the manufacturing process, but also connect production workflows happening on the shop floor with your inventory, finance and distribution process for greater efficiency and productivity enterprise-wide.
Any gap or mistake on the shop floor will backfire all business areas and more importantly the end customers – disturbing your sales order fulfilment and thereby, your brand reliability in the industry. For this reason, it is important to seamlessly communicate every single detail of each step, task and route, etc., in successful completion of the sales order.
Producing an item or batch also includes BoM (Bill of Materials) encompassing a specific sequence of events and detailed methods your shop floor employees must follow.
An ERP allows you to generate multi-level BoMs that can be configured in the production process, involving multiple routes – with specific sets of instructions in each route. That’s why, within a comprehensive system, you are going to have a well-optimized routing that will certainly make a big difference in improving shop floor efficiency – how fast you can produce finished goods.
Track Workers Progress:
In any industry, it’s important to leverage the skills of the workers on the shop floor and track their progress. Obviously, you cannot automate everything, but for shop floor productivity improvements you must be using an ERP. It will help you augment the work proficiency of your shop floor workers and allow them to make better decisions. Moreover, it will make the job easier especially for trainees.
The shop floor employees when having detailed BoMs cannot overlook the important information – expunging the guesswork and reducing the likelihoods of subjective decisions.
By splitting a BoM into step-by-step operations (routing), production teams on the shop floor know exactly what to do and can better focus on every step involved in manufacturing a finished part or assembly. An ERP software for manufacturing helps production teams and managers spot and solve shop floor and assembly line problems besides identifying the progress of the manufacturing process by end of the day.
When there is no grey area in production workflows, it will give your workers a greater capacity of understanding and improving shop floor efficiency. Moreover, when your shop floor workers have complete information about each and every step of the production or assembly process, they can easily execute it and make changes where needed to achieve finished goods at the lowest cost.
Error-free Operations:
In the manufacturing industry or any other business, everything should distill down to standardize operations with minimum-to-no errors. However, it is quite difficult to completely remove the human input and their related mistakes in any process. Despite using an ERP, there are some operations that need human resources and if they make a misstep, it could be devastating for your business growth and profitability.
As a discrete manufacturer, you may focus on all production essentials – planning both tangible and intangible resources, timely acquisition of raw materials and components required for assembly, and having the right equipment on the shop floor. However, one mistake by any of your shop floor workers will undo everything.
Here, you need to invest in improving the knowledge and skills of your production teams – especially working on the shop floor.
