Why You Need a Manufacturing Software Tool for your Schedule

In our previous blog, we talked about your people; this is a resource that is finite, moving, and expensive. You must avoid extra, unplanned, unnecessary, and urgent work for them. It costs you dearly in time, money, and even reputation, both with your team and with the customers for whom the result is late delivery. Department silos cause issues that are difficult to track and even more complex to solve. We showed you how you need a system to help with the information queuing and the delivery of it to the right people.

Let’s move on to a deeper perspective on wasted time. It seems obvious but time hides in the smallest little areas of your shop. Manufacturing happens where the information for the work required is perfectly aligned with the people and machines that will do the work and the raw materials or parts that are needed to complete it in the proper quantity. Short-change any of these and you have a problem.

Production control for your people

Wasted time often comes across as non-productive time but that is not always the case. The hours or days that your team may spend searching for the information or material that they need each month is wasted time and only becomes productive when they find what they’re looking for. While they resolve the issue at hand, they are spending time that was allotted for more productive work.

Give them every opportunity to succeed by giving them the tool(s) they need to do their work. For some, that might be actual tools; for others, it may be the right software tool to manage what they’re doing and match it up to every other schedule and area of the shop.

Why a traditional manufacturing schedule won’t work

Every shop has a schedule of some kind. Manufacturers are very creative with how they handle this for themselves. We’ve seen piles of magnets for the sides of filing cabinets, whiteboards with washi tape, Excel worksheets, Access databases, homegrown systems, and even huddles with hard copies of work distributed on the fly. None of these addresses the very nature of manufacturing – the fact that it is moving all the time. Manufacturing is never static.

Why an ERP can’t handle it

Almost every ERP and even some smaller front-office finance packages can provide a routing and a list of work to be done. Some can do this in a proscribed order. All fall short of the dynamic, rules-based schedule you need to do your work. The schedule that you set in the morning before the huddle or at the beginning of the week when you process orders is never the one that actually hits the shop. If something can go wrong, it will. And something always does go wrong. 

An ERP can list a BOM. The vendor may have even worked with you to have your operators clock on and off jobs so that you can mark things “done” on the route. It will not give you the ability to lock what they see or do while keeping your options open for routing and re-routing work. So the minute your team member finishes their current work, you are at their mercy to ensure that they do the next thing you want or need them to do. Perhaps you could go so far as to say that the ERP handles your first shift breakfast work but not through lunch. 

What you need for a manufacturing production schedule

A manufacturing production schedule is a time-based, complicated series of dance steps to complete one or more pieces of work in the standard way you always do or adjusted for the complex nature of what your customers demand of you. You will need an understanding of the work to be done, complete knowledge of what’s in process at the moment, an awareness of when all that work will be finalized, and what your next steps should be.

It would also be helpful if the tool could predict work into the future and the time that it will take based on prior history. All of this said we want you to consider a schedule that moves and shifts with you, not against. One that accounts for people “in the room” as well as the maximum schedulable time for each.

We’ve started the discussion here, but we’ll dig into the various issues we see, what’s causing them and what you can do to stop them. We’ll go through almost 20 areas before we end this series on how to buy a system. These pieces should serve as a step-by-step guide to get you there.

Ready to move forward faster? Engage with us to talk about assessing or mapping your systems and processes.  We’re only an email away, info@cimx.com.

Contact CIMx Software to see how paperless manufacturing can improve production scheduling for you.