Technology on the shop floor: empowering small manufacturing teams

Operations leaders at small and mid-sized manufacturing companies have no shortage of stress. Much of the burden of bringing in jobs on time and on budget falls on you, which explains the thirst for visibility and hawkish attention to detail regarding everything on the shop floor.

Technology providers offer many solutions to remedy this stress – fixes to the things that give headaches, slow the team down, and endanger profitability. For example, many software solutions can unify all your systems and eliminate processes that require double entry, which duplicates effort and increases the risk of manual entry error. A single system for the entire operation means someone on the floor can flag a job as complete, signal the next team member to action, and automatically document the process.

With everybody on the team seeing the same version of events, planning becomes more accurate as time and materials are recorded into the core system and production leaders are alerted as they approach budget and material thresholds. The result? Fewer rush jobs, fewer unplanned gaps in production, and a more efficient operation overall – the key to profitability.

This is all good news for operations, and many software solutions offer the end-to-end visibility and seamlessness needed to contribute to efficiency and the bottom line. However, not all of them will get used as intended, even if their high-level functionality sounded like exactly what was needed.

But beware, as small and mid-sized manufacturing ERP software is almost always created with massive enterprises in mind. There are two dangers to this:

• Installing a feature overkill system that is too hard to learn and is a pain to train the team to use.
• Implementing a system where even the functionality that is there assumes too much about the way team members need to work, which straightjackets the process

In either case, it can result in under-adopted or underutilized software, which is a huge waste.

“How can the system respond to the unique way my team works?” is one of the most important questions you ask when evaluating manufacturing software solutions. If nobody uses it, it’s wasted time and money. And, if the team uses it but can’t configure it to work the way you need them to, the result is the same.

One of the most important capabilities is configuration, which will allow even non-technical users to modify the application to mirror workflow without the cost and complexity of writing and maintaining software code.

This seemingly simple, yet powerfully true requirement cannot be overstated. Manufacturing ERP solutions typically come with the standard off-the-shelf capability that is required to cover about 70% of business needs. While those features and functions will help run a small- to medium-sized business (SMB) manufacturing facility, they are missing the key to a competitive advantage – the 30% of nonstandard processes unique to a company that users need to manage more effectively.

This is where the difference between configuration and customization becomes apparent. Adding a custom field or table is great, but what is really needed in the software is the ability to add a new process or change the process flow. Only a configurable cloud manufacturing ERP solution will allow users to do this, without breaking the base functionality of the solution.

For operations leaders at SMB manufacturing companies, technology has a huge impact in how you can deliver jobs. One of the ways to ensure a wise choice is to look for a system that can work the way the team wants it to work – without burdening the company with unnecessary cost and complexity. When seeking ways to improve performance, it is important to determine if the solution being evaluated is configurable and if so, at what cost. If the answer is it’s not, or that configuration can only be done by the vendor, maybe it’s time to eliminate that software from the running.

KeyedIn Solutions Inc.
www.keyedin.com

About the author: Lori Payne is vice president, manufacturing development at KeyedIn Solutions and can be reached at info@keyedin.com.