Understand What’s Happening on the Floor

Too often, traditional software solutions promise to make the lives of job shop manufacturers easier, but they rarely deliver the intended promise of actually making things less difficult. There is a lot of ERP software today that is built to solve those issues, but it tends to be really, really complex, and maybe even too accurate. The scheduling is too accurate. It doesn’t take into account all of the variability that is so common in job shops.

Between each step in the production process, the product has to move from one place to another and some may be taking longer than planned or required. This follows the whole idea of dependent events, which is actually what happens in a job shop. So, scheduling becomes very, very difficult and complicated because of the many dependent events. When this happens, job shops fall into having people manage that whole process in Excel, on whiteboards, or with Kanban boards. Manual processes are convoluted and difficult to track.

There is a solution that actually does solve these issues – manufacturing productivity software.  You can measure utilization, planned versus actual changeover times, and planned versus actual operation time. You can import your schedule and track against the jobs at an operational level to be able to give you that granularity of knowing if you’re running ahead or behind.

There are specific requirements and metrics in job shops, much of which are traditionally measured and tracked manually. In these types of companies, there are machine-based operations with machine tools, like mills, lathes, saws, press brakes, etc. but, there could be a lot of manual operations as well. Hand assembly, welding, and so on, that aren’t practical to measure through a piece of equipment. With manufacturing productivity, you can collect the data from people, too, not just the machines. It covers all of the bases by giving an entire view into the plant, not just the machines that make the product, all while getting rid of tedious manual processes.

The biggest benefit is the scheduling feature – tracking against the schedule, looking at machine utilization, and understanding if you have bottlenecks. Using the scheduling tool, you can also see where you might have excess capacity to see where you may be able to slot something in today if you receive a rush order. Or, you could use the schedule to understand if you’re ahead or behind, as well. You could even see your capacity, historically, over time.

Job shop software like Mingo gives you the visibility you need into the plant, through machines and people, while eliminating manual reporting and solving the problem of overly complex schedules

We understand that things happen at the plant, even when you’re not there. Because of that, we created an iOS and Android mobile application to provide insight into the plant, remotely. Not only will you be able to see real-time performance data, but you can configure alerts to tell you when a machine goes down or scrap is too high. Receive push notifications and never let problems go unnoticed or unaddressed again.

We also have other features to provide even more insight. Scoreboards placed throughout the plant, real-time dashboards accessible via any web browser, and operator screens stationed at every machine or line provide visibility for the entire plant. By using these visual management tools, the entire company can see and understand what’s happening, creating better-aligned teams, more employee engagement, stronger communication, and a great culture.

The hard part of job shops is that everything is different, every single day. A job shop can be medium to low volume, but medium to high mix, creating an environment of constant change. Some job shops do produce thousands of the same things, but a lot of job shops are totally custom and everything is engineered to order.

There are unique requirements for a job shop. Each machine, each person, each work center, each cell could be doing something different every day, which makes planning for that really, really difficult. It is much easier to schedule, understand capacity, order products, do quotes, develop cost projections, all of those things you need to run a factory when you’re making the same thing every single day. But, if every day is different and every time you make something, it’s different, how do you plan and predict? And, what metrics do you track to accommodate for the high variability in a job shop?

Performance metrics are not the key metrics in a job shop. The plant is not asking, “How many parts were produced on a machine?” But, instead, it’s the changeover times and run times that matter most to the plant operations team. They’re asking:

• “What’s an estimate for how long it takes to set up a machine and changeover from one job to another?”
• “How long should a job take to run? ”
• “Is the job close to that time?”

These are all local optimization numbers. “Is this machine or this operation running the way it should?” And, when you have those numbers, you can begin to look at the more holistic view of the plant by asking:

• “How much capacity do we actually have?
• “If we got a rush job today, where could we actually fit it in?”

So, unlike a more traditional manufacturing environment, performance doesn’t matter nearly as much as the metrics needed to understand changeover and run time. Also while on-time delivery is something that matters to any manufacturer, a job shop places greater importance on the need to track, not only on-time delivery to the external customer, but on-time delivery to the internal customer. Which basically means that from one operation to another, what does that look like and how is it tracked. “So, if we’re supposed to make these parts today and finish them today, did we do that? Yes or no? Why not?”

Let’s not forget about quality, either. In a factory that produces the same product every single day, quality is easily automated. In that highly automated, high volume, repetitive company, you have most of those check processes built into the equipment already. But, in a job shop, measuring quality is typically a manual process. Sometimes, a job shop has tooling and machines that will measure and check parts, but more often than not, the process of monitoring quality falls to job packets or job travelers and humans.

Because everything is different every time, these job packets or job travelers “travel” around the shop for detailing and verifying each step in the production process. The problem with this is the fact that these travelers are paper that can get lost, be torn, spilled on, etc.

This is where job shop software can provide immense benefit in eliminating manual processes, providing visibility, and providing simple scheduling methods.