"How many brackets did we finish?"
"Forty. It says so on the traveler."
"There are thirty-six on the cart by the weld cell."
"Then four went in the scrap bin by the saw on Tuesday. Nobody wrote it down."
By Friday the traveler is back in the office, someone types 40 into the ERP because that is what the paper says, and the job gets costed on four brackets that do not exist.
Shop floor management software records production work as it happens: the material issued to each work order, the labor by operator and operation, the quantities completed and scrapped, and where each job stands. The catch is that three different kinds of product are sold under that name, and only one of them would have caught the four brackets. Our warehouse operations posts cover the rest of running a floor day to day.
The shop floor is the production area of a plant, as opposed to the office. Managing it means knowing during the shift what each job is waiting on, while there is still time to do something about it.
Five claims about shop floor software, checked
"Shop floor management software is an MES"
Sometimes. A NIST manufacturing blog post defines a manufacturing execution system, or MES, as software that accounts for production inputs and outputs, and some of what is sold as shop floor software is one. Search the term and you will find three kinds of product:
- Machine monitoring and DNC tools connect to the machines. They collect run time and downtime, send programs to CNC machines and calculate OEE, overall equipment effectiveness.
- Quality and production record systems, often an MES, run the procedure with work instructions and inspection sign-offs, which suits a plant with heavy documentation requirements.
- Shop floor data collection has operators scan material, labor and completions against the work orders already in your ERP, so you can see what a job used and what it cost.
Pick by the question you need answered. Machines sitting idle for no known reason point to the first kind. Documentation points to the second. Job cost and material that never match the ERP point to the third.
"It will tell you why the machine sat idle"
A monitoring tool will, because it connects to the machine. A data collection system knows what an operator scanned and when. If an operator does not scan, it knows nothing, the same weakness the paper traveler has.
"It replaces the ERP's work orders"
The ERP still holds the bills of materials, the work orders and the costs, and the floor software reads them and posts back what happened. That split is also the answer to which software handles inventory in a plant: the ERP holds the financial record of items, quantities and costs, and the floor software records what physically happened.
Ask how a system posts to the ERP, and how often. Some post each transaction as it happens and others sync on a schedule, and that decides how current job cost is during the day.
"A phone is enough for the operators"
Not always, because operators need something they can carry or mount at a work center. Here is what separates a mobile computer from a smartphone. Barcoded travelers and part labels make every scan quicker, and our primer on how barcodes work covers the basics.
"The software fixes the paper problem by itself"
It moves data entry from the office to the people doing the work, and somebody has to own that. Material pulled for a job and never issued leaves the ERP showing stock that is gone, and labor rebuilt from memory makes job cost a guess. When I became operations manager at the three-site company, I laid five finished travelers next to the ERP's job screens. Material and quantities were close, but the hours were not, because labor was the last line anyone filled in, on Friday, from memory.
Pick a supervisor who checks that every step gets scanned. Start with one cell or line, run it until the counts match the ERP, then roll out to the next.
What this looks like on your ERP
Endpoint is the third kind: shop floor data collection. Operators scan material issue, labor and completions on handheld devices, and Endpoint posts them to your ERP. It does not monitor machines or calculate OEE. What it covers depends on the ERP you run.
- On Sage 100, Endpoint for Sage manufacturing packages put material issue, labor tracking, work ticket status updates, time cards and completions on a mobile device. The advanced package adds over-issues, over-completions and automatic labor track-out.
- On Sage Intacct, OPS for Intacct adds work orders and production tracking.
- On Endpoint Cloud, the Production workflow follows work orders from issuance through completion, with work in progress and bill of materials consumption. With Sage 100, Endpoint Cloud does not sync bills of materials or work orders.
Production support differs by ERP, so ask for yours in writing.
One thing to ask in the next demo
Ask the vendor to scan one operation's material and labor against a job, then open that work order in your ERP and show you both lines. Ask how long after the scan they showed up. If the answer involves a schedule or somebody re-keying, write down how long.
