What is Monday Project Management Software?
Monday is a project management software. It gives you the ability to look at all of the tasks that people have to complete, determine who’s doing what, and track against the progress made. For those of you wondering, Monday is similar to Jira or Trello.
Monday is purpose-built for back-office functions but can work in other scenarios, too. This applies to manufacturing, depending on what kind of manufacturing you’re doing. If every job can be tracked as a “project”, Monday can provide basic organization on the factory floor.
Think about how certain types of manufacturing work. This will demonstrate how Monday could be useful. There are a bunch of different steps, people involved, and operations that each product has to go through to be completed, each of those a task. In this case, Monday can help to track where each product is in the process, who’s making sure it’s done, and if it’s been completed. Sounds simple, right? Most will think they can use basic project management software to track that. And, to a certain extent, that’s true.
But, the problem arises when you want to do anything beyond those basic functions. If you want operators to update the data versus someone in the back office, it becomes much more difficult. If you want to track downtime, it’s virtually impossible with a platform like Monday.
This is because basic project management software like Monday isn’t designed for the plant floor. It’s designed for project managers and office workers to move the tasks around, not plant managers, engineers, or operators to run the production floor.
Most importantly, there are none of the manufacturing contexts that you need.
What’s the Difference Between Mingo vs. Monday?
When you use a basic project management software like Monday, there’s nothing built into the system that provides a concept of key manufacturing metrics: cycle times, scrap, parts, ability to add downtime reasons, details about why something was late. There’s no ability to automatically collect data from the machines. The dashboarding capabilities are very limited and focused on project management and the percentage completed, but if something isn’t completed on time, you don’t know why because you don’t have the detail.
Even engineer to order companies that do repetitive things. They’re cutting, welding, sawing, milling, etc., and there’s a common structure around these things. All of which basic project management software can’t support or provide detail on.
It all comes down to the idea of using the right tool for the right job. Yes, you could screw a nail in with a screwdriver, but wouldn’t a hammer be the better tool for the job? You can use Monday to perform project management tasks that are designed to be in an office, but not in the plant. Whereas you can use Mingo to provide visibility and accountability on the factory floor.
These basic project management tools like Monday are missing the basic underlying constructs that make Mingo more valuable to manufacturers.
Like we mentioned above, the basic platforms are lacking the context of cycle times, parts, downtime, scrap, and process data that is unique to manufacturing analytics software. Monday is really only the scheduling portion of our software, but even that is limited.
We’ll be devil’s advocate here for a moment, though. If all you’re doing is tracking when things should start and stop and if a part is done or not, Monday will probably work for you. If you’re moving from a paper-based system that’s currently relying on whiteboards, clipboards, and Excel, and migrating that manual reporting to Monday, you’ll be good to go. Anything is better than manual reporting. You’re only looking at simple metrics about the completion of a part, and it will work fine for that intended purpose.
But, the second you start asking questions about “Why”? you’re not going to have any of the detail. “Why is this part late? Why is the machine not running? How long did it really take to make a part? How many parts did we really make?”
These are questions that will not have an answer with simple project management software like Monday. At this point, manufacturing analytics is going to be the solution you need to run the factory floor.
Without Context, You Have No Idea Why Something Has Happened
Effectively, Monday is scheduling and project management software. It does those things very well, and if you’re only focused on scheduling and project management, it will work for you. The added bonus is that it’s really inexpensive.
It has some of the components to do what we do at Mingo, but it’s missing the context, so much of the broader detail. It all comes down to the “Why?” and the detail. Think about the following questions.
- If we didn’t finish on time, why not? Did we meet demand?
- How much scrap did we have? Why did we have scrap?
- What were the downtime reasons for that?
- How long did it take us to finish one part?
- How long did it take to complete an entire product?
- Why were we late?
- Why were we on time?
Will you know the answer with basic project management software? The answer is no. You need manufacturing analytics to get that level of detail.
Once you move beyond, “Is this complete or not?”, you’ll get the visibility and accountability you need to improve efficiencies on the floor. That’s when the lightbulb goes off, and people realize they need greater detail to truly improve their productivity.
It’s all comes down to the why.
Like we said before, when you’re going from manual reporting, paper, and Excel, Monday’s price point and features look incredibly appealing for manufacturers. And, they will work for those super basic functionalities that are needed on the factory floor. You can see how many jobs are scheduled for each resource, or machine and how long they’re supposed to take. It seems at a high level that this would actually work.
But, when you start to consider the level of detail you’re eventually going to need, Mingo is going to come out on top.
To recap, Monday is great for back-office organization. Mingo is purpose-built for the factory floor. The two are not interchangeable.
