The Benefits of Shop Floor Data Capture for Manufacturers
What is Shop Floor Data Capture?
Shop floor data capture, often abbreviated to SFDC, is a process where shop floor operatives book on and off works orders in real time on the production floor. Many manufacturers are not using SFDC as a tool to help them run production more efficiently and are missing out on a huge amount of data (and therefore insight) that SFDC brings with it. Some benefits include:
- Real-time job progress – identify bottlenecks
- Accurate and complete product costing
- Productivity analysis by employee or work centre
- Planning accuracy improvements
Is your plan as accurate as you think, or do you simply react?
Labour and materials are recorded against a works order in real time. This leads to a production leadership team having the ability to identify in real time if a job is running behind, and adapt their plan as a proactive response, rather than be reactive and having a planning meeting to work out what is running behind. Because SFDC is happening real time, bottlenecks are quickly identified and plans put in place to remedy the bottleneck.
Do you truly know how much that product costs to make?
By recording time and materials as they happen in real time, the works order costs are not only more complete, but far more accurate. Without SFDC, there would be an administrative overhead to issue materials to production, and no way of analysing where productive labour costs were absorbed in the business.
Productivity analysis using data
Data is king in manufacturing, and SFDC brings a wealth of data that would be otherwise untapped. By having analysis tools as part of the SFDC process, a manufacturer can analyse if certain workers are more suited to certain tasks. For example, I can tell that worker 1 produces on average 120 parts per hour on product A, whereas worker 2 produces only 80 parts per hour on the same product. The next time I plan to produce product A, I would look to try and plan this against worker 1 to get an instant efficiency gain. My product will be produced cheaper, my employees are more productive, and my margins will improve. I can also identify that worker 2 may need additional training, and so I could improve their productivity simply by identifying they are below the average on a range of parts.
How can Access products help?
SFDC is a feature of Access ERP, Scheduling and MRP systems. With business intelligence, automatic exception alerting, and visibility of job progress in scheduling, a manufacturer has the toolkit to get those marginal gains to take the business performance to the next level. Contact us to find out how embracing SFDC can help your business discover data and efficiency gains that you are missing out on.
