3 min read

What the Customer Expects

Kristin McLane : November 1, 2022 at 10:00 AM

What is Paperless Manufacturing? How can software improve production? How is MES different than ERP and other software?

Whether you make to order or stock to inventory, you’re always thinking of the customer. Your customer. You want to make what they want to buy. It’s why you’re here. And, frankly, the best way to service them would be to stay just one step ahead of them. If you could produce exactly what your customers wanted just moments before they asked, you would be the most profitable, productive, and magical manufacturer ever. No one can do this.

Or can they?

How close do you think you could get to this and what would it mean to you? You could keep your assets at the minimum you need to keep you the most productive. You would hire and keep on-staff only the people you needed to get the work done. You would never need to staff-up to account for that sudden growth in orders that may or may not stay consistent over time. You could stock your raw materials, parts, and goods to just what is required but no more. Eliminate the cost of inventory overstocks or things “just lying around.”

What about your schedule? You could plan for all work to be done in an orderly and best-practice fashion. No more rush jobs. And while you could eliminate machine downtime altogether, you could certainly make sure that all preventative maintenance was completed exactly when and as planned. You could plan for training time for employees to ensure that you had a full crew and they were moving ahead in their certifications. Or just learning new things so you could keep them engaged.

Is that even possible?

Digitizing the manufacturing experience

Using a system that’s built to handle your manufacturing (no ERPs here), you can get ahead on this goal. Computers are more accurate than humans and you need all the help you can get. Let me take an aside here to talk about why we regularly say an ERP is not enough. You all have one. Whether it’s a true ERP or a financial package like QuickBooks, you need some measure of your financial performance so you buy one. You also have the entire Microsoft suite and that isn’t helping you either.

An ERP is not the flexible tool that you need it to be. It’s not aware of what you’re doing where and whether that’s going to plan. Why? ERPs are built to predict financial behavior, not human behavior. And financials aren’t making your products down on the shop floor. People are. People are inherently not machines. Machines are built to do the same thing the same way all the time. Every. Single. Time. People are not. We get distracted. We have feelings and, on days when you’re angry or tired or experiencing emotions of any kind, it goes right into your work.

An ERP doesn’t measure feelings (for sure) and can’t help you when things are going emotional or poorly. It doesn’t know when a job or an order, or even an operation or procedure isn’t going as expected. It can’t help you when you can’t find inventory because it doesn’t know where it is. The ERP is either decremented for inventory at the beginning or end of your work but rarely can it tell you what’s happening right at this moment and how much inventory you actually have where in-process.

And, because of that, it’s making you get further behind.

You need a system that understands you on the shop floor. One that knows what’s supposed to happen next and can queue that up properly. One that can account for work going slower than planned and give you workflows to counteract that down the line. One that can get you on track and keep you there.

Let’s start with your staff and go from there. Your people are usually your most important and expensive asset and they’re always a good place to start when you’re looking at what you need in the shop. From there, we’ll step through inventory and other areas that you might not expect, including work center performance and quality. Each of these plays a key role in whether or not you can get your work done on time and get it out the door as expected. We are going to try to get close to predicting your customer behavior and have what they want as they need it.

Anticipating inventory needs, adapting to schedule changes, and predicting customer demand are much easier when you have a dynamic, analytical solution built for production. A solution like Quantum. Are you ready to have real-time shop floor information at your fingertips? Send us a message at info@cimx.com. Or, consider a Process Gap Analysis of your shop.