Why You Need a Manufacturing Software Tool for your People

Last time, we talked about how we often we waste our biggest resource – our people. If you find that your team is doing extra, unplanned, unnecessary or even rushed work, you may have a larger problem. 

We talked about lack of communication between departments – even where you have teams working well together, if teams don’t work well across the organization, you have the opportunity for production issues.

Anyone born after the year 1990 may not engage with the way you communicate if you’re doing it on paper. They’re used to rapid, on-demand information. They’ve had cellphones at their fingertips for their entire lives and they rely on a few keystrokes to get what they need.

On the basic level, you can provide communication tools like huddles to start the flow of information, but that won’t go far enough if you’re trying to produce orders faster, more efficiently, and to tougher standards of quality and profit.

A production system for your shop

For this series, we’ll be alternating a discussion of key issues that we see on shop floors with some requirements for you to consider in a system to fix them. Do you know where to start? If you have implemented a financial system, a front-office toolset or even an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) package, you may have worked with the vendor to customize your financial processes. The implementation was likely unwieldy and more expensive and time-consuming than you were told.  

So how can you build a list of functional requirements outlining the right tool for your shop? Is it your responsibility or your vendor's to do this work?

We hope to outline for you, step by step, the challenges, and causes that we most often see. Perhaps there’s good information in the lessons of others for you when looking for a production system. Basic functionality is a must; a modern, well-designed system makes it easy to make the choice. But there’s a whole world in between those 2 things. We’ll lay that out for you here.

This week, we’re using your people issues to help.

What silos tell you about the right manufacturing software tool

You’ve identified that you’re struggling with people. Your people don’t have all the information they need to do their work. Or, they have that information but something’s gone wrong and now they are lost. You see their communications issues and you want to help them. What do you need to do that? If you find that you like a system that you’ve reviewed, do you know what it will do to help your team?

Siloed communication usually signals that information is not flowing freely from one team to the next, from one step of production to another. Your operators and all of your production teams want and need the information, resources, materials, and time to do their work. Anything more or less distracts them from their key job and makes it difficult for them to make progress.

The work they do is constantly in motion. Your inventory doesn’t sit waiting for that job – it gets used as new orders come in and you find it impossible to know what you need where and by when. That financial system, by its nature, can only be a planning tool, not a production one. It cannot handle the rigors of moving work.

To handle communication in production, you will need:

• A steady, properly-timed flow of information to your workforce
• An accurate and complete listing of your current inventory
• Real-time results from the work completed
• Automated updating of your Work in Progress (WIP) dashboard(s)
• Instantaneous notification of issues in production to the proper people and
• Workaround functions for when things don’t go according to plan.

Let’s start with the basics. Do you have a morning huddle or stand-up? Today, you’d be crazy not to. Driving manufacturing productivity requires an all-team meeting. Manufacturing production is constantly in motion (you’ve heard us say this so many times) and without the daily meeting, your team is divided, siloed, even removed from each other.

Start it on time. End it on time. Cover the work to do today, challenges you have, open items. Need help? Ask us. We can show you the huddles that we use to run our own business.

It would also be helpful if the toolset captured all this information in a written record and digital archive of all the work you and your team have completed, what went right and wrong, and to which customer(s) you sent the outcome of those production efforts.

Instructions for your Production Team

The primary thing your team needs is written instructions to do their work. These could be a single “title” line or pages of specific information. No matter how detailed you need it to be, they can reach their greatest productivity if you provide them the directions quickly and accurately every time.

A manufacturing software tool that provides proper instructions needs to be able to parse them to the correct individuals and save them from flipping page by page to find the information. It must give them basic safety instructions and a list of the tools, materials, and parts (subassemblies) that they need to do their work.

It should also allow them to adjust it, in real-time, when something goes wrong. Dead-heading in the aisle is a key source of manufacturing waste and easily happens when your team must wait for someone to help them.

A Production Schedule for your Production Team

Once you have the ability to transmit a few lines or a few pages of information to the right individuals at the right time, you need to provide them with a prioritized and weighted work queue. Tell them what to do in what order without making them wait. This seems simple, but you need to be able to "weigh" some work as more important. Once you’re able to do this, you also have the capacity to actually introduce both change and information-based decision-making. Prior to this point, your decisions are all likely made on your best guess, based on the knowledge you have at the time, how little that may be.

An Excel sheet or even an ERP or MRP may be able to generate a queue but an interactive, real-time view of your shop floor and insertion of work as required may be far beyond them. Think about how your team currently completes work when something goes wrong.   A point person makes a decision based on the best information they can.

Without a schedule, your team(s) will be forced to live in those silos that we discussed early. It’s a survival mechanism. When things are not going right, they revert to the least common denominator – in this case, it’s the work they’re most familiar with. That’s not going to come close to the most efficient way to get all your work done. Not even close.

Wasted Time

Next time, we’ll continue to tackle wasted time in manufacturing. We’ve started the discussion here, but we’ll dig into the various areas we see, what’s often causing it and what you can do to stop it. We’ll go through almost 20 areas before we end this series on how to buy a system. These pieces should serve as a step-by-step guide to get you there.

Need that information faster? Engage with us to talk about assessing or mapping your systems and processes.  We’re only an email away, info@cimx.com.

Contact CIMx Software to see how paperless manufacturing can improve production communication for you.