What the Customer Expects

Digitizing the manufacturing experience

Using a system that’s built to handle your manufacturing (no ERPs here), you can get ahead on this goal. Computers are more accurate than humans and you need all the help you can get. Let me take an aside here to talk about why we regularly say an ERP is not enough. You all have one. Whether it’s a true ERP or a financial package like QuickBooks, you need some measure of your financial performance so you buy one. You also have the entire Microsoft suite and that isn’t helping you either.

An ERP is not the flexible tool that you need it to be. It’s not aware of what you’re doing where and whether that’s going to plan. Why? ERPs are built to predict financial behavior, not human behavior. And financials aren’t making your products down on the shop floor. People are. People are inherently not machines. Machines are built to do the same thing the same way all the time. Every. Single. Time. People are not. We get distracted. We have feelings and, on days when you’re angry or tired or experiencing emotions of any kind, it goes right into your work.

An ERP doesn’t measure feelings (for sure) and can’t help you when things are going emotional or poorly. It doesn’t know when a job or an order, or even an operation or procedure isn’t going as expected. It can’t help you when you can’t find inventory because it doesn’t know where it is. The ERP is either decremented for inventory at the beginning or end of your work but rarely can it tell you what’s happening right at this moment and how much inventory you actually have where in-process.

And, because of that, it’s making you get further behind.

You need a system that understands you on the shop floor. One that knows what’s supposed to happen next and can queue that up properly. One that can account for work going slower than planned and give you workflows to counteract that down the line. One that can get you on track and keep you there.

Let’s start with your staff and go from there. Your people are usually your most important and expensive asset and they’re always a good place to start when you’re looking at what you need in the shop. From there, we’ll step through inventory and other areas that you might not expect, including work center performance and quality. Each of these plays a key role in whether or not you can get your work done on time and get it out the door as expected. We are going to try to get close to predicting your customer behavior and have what they want as they need it. 

Anticipating inventory needs, adapting to schedule changes, and predicting customer demand are much easier when you have a dynamic, analytical solution built for production. A solution like Quantum. Are you ready to have real-time shop floor information at your fingertips? Send us a message at info@cimx.com.  Or, consider a Process Gap Analysis of your shop. 

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