Production management and control software

We take a deep dive into how a manufacturing business can manage its production processes and control the variables that can change in scheduling function.

April 18, 2022
Contents

Stay in control of all your manufacturing processes. Oversee all steps of your production at any given time with real-time manufacturing information. Increase productivity with scheduling systems and real-time planning, and reduce waste and inventory costs through lean manufacturing. Production control software from Statii provides you and your company with the manufacturing execution software (MES) to monitor and control all your manufacturing and production through every step of the process.

Ultimately, you will increase overall plant efficiency and productivity by scheduling production effectively and remaining informed and in control over production during the entire manufacturing process. Cut your costs by reducing waste, scrap and machine downtime, while our MES will help you foresee and solve manufacturing problems before, or as they occur. By using our software your plant management will become more efficient, as it allows you to play a more proactive role by helping you identify inefficiencies and facilitating more efficient resource use.

Our software allows you to arrange, control and optimise the work and workloads for your production and manufacturing process. Allocate plant and machinery resources effectively, plan production processes appropriately and know the most effective way to allocate your human resources. This will ensure that you purchase and allocate only what resources you require and will facilitate a more cost-effective and efficient plant. As such, your waste, scrap, human resource inefficiencies and machine downtime will all be reduced for lean manufacturing.

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About Our Planning and Scheduling Systems

Production planning and management

Effective production planning will help ensure that your resources are allocated appropriately and your production capacity is at its most efficient. Ease your capacity planning process with our software to help you maximise your efficiency and reach your effective capacity. Determine your requirements to match customer demands and schedule your production process appropriately so as to meet demands and maximise profits. Your plant efficiency begins with production planning.

Work In Progress (WIP) tracking

Through Statii’s shop floor data collection (SFDC) you can control the entirety of your production process and track your WIP in real time. With our SFDC you will constantly have a robust real time data collection solution, for you to efficiently track your production process and manage it efficiently. Harnessing accurate and reliable data is vital to realistically tracking the current status of all WIP. With this software, you will be able to assess your true capacity for planning and scheduling your manufacturing output. You will also be able to anticipate production problems and deal with them before your experience and significant losses, thereby maintaining maximum efficiency.

The Necessity of Production Control Software

For your manufacturing operations to reach their full potential it is imperative for you to maintain an effective level of control over your production process. If you are not tracking and controlling the efficiency of every step of your plant’s production, then your plant is most likely not running at maximum efficiency. Statii’s production control software allows you to monitor every step of your manufacturing process from scheduling to the finished product. This gives you total control over your production line so that you can plan appropriately and make the right decisions to maximise your productivity and cut down your waste, scrap and machine and human resources downtime. This significantly reduces your costs and increases your ability to meet your customer needs and demands as effectively as possible.

Scheduling

This initial stage of the production process is in many ways also the most important. In this stage you map out the entire process, from machinery, to raw materials, to human resources. There are many variables to take into consideration and different facets to manage. Statii’s software will help plan and organise the scheduling process, so as to track the different components of the manufacturing process, and ensure that every phase of production is carried out at maximum efficiency. Scheduling also helps keep you in control of the most basic, yet most important production concepts: inputs and outputs.

Inputs:

• Plant
• Labour
• Materials
• Tooling
• Energy

Outputs:

• Any product produced by the factory.

Key to managing inputs and outputs is resource allocation, which is the process by which inputs are allocated to produce a desired output. This is the very essence of manufacturing.

The benefits of effective software scheduling include:

• Effective time management due to process change-over reduction.
• Cut costs due to inventory reduction and levelling.
• Reduced scheduling effort on your part.
• Increased productivity efficiency.
• Levelling of labour loads for both machinery and human resources.
• Real time information keeping you updated throughout the manufacturing process.
• Increased ability to meet consumer demands with realistic time-frames.

Statii’s production control software will facilitate your effective management of plant scheduling, thereby laying the foundation for an efficient, cost-effective manufacturing process.

Capacity Planning and Inventory Control

In manufacturing it is crucial to be aware of what exactly the demand is for your products, and what production capacity is required to meet these constantly changing demands. Discrepancies between production and demand can mean you either produce too much for consumer demands, or produce too little to meet such demands; either way, this results in significant financial losses and can indeed make or break your plant.

Ultimately you strive for effective capacity, the maximum productivity you are capable of. Through improving overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) you can better utilise your existing capacity. While production can be increased by introducing new equipment and materials, our software will help you maximise your OEE by helping you get everything you can out of your machinery and reducing waste. The software will make capacity planning a simpler, easier process that can help you make better decisions regarding your production capacity so as to meet consumer demands as effectively as possible.

Herein lies the vitality of inventory control. Our software allows you to manage a properly controlled inventory, which is central to capacity planning. Inventory control is employed to maximise your use of inventory so that you cut down on waste, and therefore costs. This means that you can maximise your profits with the absolute minimum of inventory investments. Our production planning software will allow for you to maximise your productivity, while reducing your costs, thereby increasing your profits.

Monitoring and tracking your production

It is vital to remain dynamic and flexible during the manufacturing process, as unforeseen circumstances and events can always arise. Even with impeccable planning you need to be able to monitor your production for the entire process. With real time production monitoring software you can ensure that every step of the manufacturing process is running according to schedule. This allows you to maximise your OEE without jeopardising your production.

Production monitoring software is also your means of being staying on top of any problems which may occur in your production line. By monitoring your production you can identify problem areas and address any issues which may be slowing down your schedule and thus reducing plant efficiency. Tracking the progress of your production with our software provides you with the knowledge you require to adjust your manufacturing process to operate at optimum production capacity.

Overall benefits of using Statii’s production monitoring software include:

• Improved overall plant efficiency, productivity and quality.
• Effective data capture and analysis of machine processes and performance data.
• Elimination of unnecessary human resources and machinery downtime.
• Identification of production maintenance issues which can then be addressed and resolved before they become a problem.
• Reduced monitoring expenses, as this software will cover all your production monitoring needs.

This software provides the flexibility to gather unique data specific to your requirements. As such, it will help you to gather and analyse the specific data you require in order to move your plant in the right direction to reach its ideal production capacity.

Stay Organised

Statii’s software provides manufacturers with the tools required to ensure that the overall operations of any given plant or factory stay organised in an easy and effective system. Our enterprise resource planning (ERP) software will collect, store, manage and interpret all the data from your various factory integrated applications. This includes:

• Product planning
• Scheduling
• Inventory management
• Manufacturing processes
• Machinery OEE statistics
• Costs
• Shipping and payment

Through using our comprehensive ERP software, you will be able to keep track of the capacity and productivity of your plant. Not only this, but you will be able to understand all the different components of your plant in relation to each other. Instead of various sectors of your manufacturing operation being understood as independent from one another, the ERP software will illustrate exactly how all of these parts work together. Again this will make managing your production easier for you, while the software will additionally provide you with all the tools you require to address any problematic patterns which may emerge as you track the long term progress of your factory.

Time Management

With our software you will be able to also track and take charge of just how long the production process takes. Statii’s software includes job and route card facilities which you can use to measure just how long the production of a particular output takes, as well as what exactly the sequence of a particular output is.

Job cards are used to track what takes place in the production process. A job card is created for a single production and tracks the time, materials and machinery / human resources that are involved in the production of an output. This allows you to examine exactly where your resources and time are being invested.

Route cards are used to deepen this process of understanding. Route cards focus specifically on the actual processes the materials undergo to become the finished product. They track the sequencing of processes and are especially useful if manufacturing various, custom products.

It is important to develop your own job and route cards to establish your own methods of production. This way, you needn’t spend unnecessary time on trying to figure out how to recreate
old products, as the software will have stored the job and route cards you require to recreate those products. Such cards are important time saving resources.

SFDC and Real Time Planning

SFDC is how all the data you require for production tracking and monitoring is collected. SFDC records and analyses the production process data while it is actually happening, which allows you to monitor the manufacturing process in real time. It is absolutely vital if you to have an efficient factory to have effective SFDC software.

Without the production monitoring software, problems may arise that you are completely unaware of. Situations which could cause irreparable damage to your machinery resources, destroy your materials or harm your human resources are far more likely to arise if you do not monitor the production process closely. If you do not know what is going on at every stage of production, you are jeopardizing not only your profits, but your livelihood.

SFDC keeps not only you informed of the production process, but everyone involved. This means that your staff can respond more quickly to problems or changes that need to be made in the process. You can do real time planning which will maximise your capacity and thereby drive-up your profits.

SFDC benefits are plentiful, and include:

• Automated data collection
• Product traceability
• Quality control
• Automated production reporting
• Materials control
• Streamlined data collection which reduces the need for hard copy data storage
• Significantly reduces human resources required to audit data and products
• Accurate data recording and tracking

Essentially, a quality SFDC software system can streamline all data related activities your plant requires, and can fulfil all such needs without the risk of human error. It will reduce your costs, and allow for greater productivity efficiency due to time saved. Additionally, it will centralise all of your data collection accurately and transparently.

Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES)

Ultimately, without an effective, comprehensive MES, or the appropriate production control software, you are putting your manufacturing plant at significant risk, and running it at excessive costs. Increased efficiency, superior data handling capabilities and ERP software all give you a significant upper hand in manufacturing and production, saving you time and money, and ensuring your plant runs at its maximum effective capacity.

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