Tracking Software in the Manufacturing Environment
From the production of the smallest nut, to the development of massive rigging assemblies, all items and processes that go into the making of the part, piece, or assembly must be accounted for. Without this knowledge, margins are lost and profitability is a function of guesswork. In the past, the accounting of manpower, material, and machinery was the result of painstaking, though often erroneous, handwritten data in the form of charts and reports. The collection of this data would take days to complete and weeks to assess. In the age of massive batch (make-to-stock) inventory production, blunders in data tallies or the absence of complete information had only a rippling effect on what was largely the quantitative appreciation of manufacturing in the Industrial Revolution.
Today, however, with make-to-order and the job shop manufacturing environments, specialized and small batch production means more emphasis must be placed on margins—today, it is often quality over quantity. Quality control, in fact, is the name of the manufacturing game. For this reason, labor and resources must be tracked in order to assess the profitability of any production process and/or product. Today, blunders in data collection can have tidal-wave effects on the bottom-line.
In order to maintain control over the many tasks necessary to make the successful job today, tracking software has been developed that can report in seconds what used to take weeks to figure. The most robust tracking software is found within complete enterprise resource planning software (ERP), where real time data is collected and analyzed, all in a single-source system. The modern ERP system can take in thousands of pieces of often disparate data—from sales orders to shipping—and assess status of the complete organization.
Most tracking software uses advanced computer technologies to input, track, and report data. These technologies can include graphical user interfaces (GUI) as terminals on the shop floor and bar coding of inventory and routers. At any moment, workers can use these ERP technologies to log onto and off jobs, request material, and ship products. What this means for management is a greater ability to track job status and to create more sophisticated production scheduling schemes that, in turn, maximize capacity. At the same time, ERP tracking software helps in maintaining a just-in-time (JIT) lean operation that minimizes on-hand inventories.
Most of all, ERP tracking software brings to the modern manufacturer the ability to quickly and easily avoid the accounting mistakes of the past, and to enhance not only on-time delivery percentages, but the positive customer relations that are a result of it.