An out of control inventory process impacts your factory in so many ways.  Items are incorrectly located, obsolete, overstocked or understocked - you just don’t know.  It’s pretty chaotic to release production orders without accurate inventory data and you really don’t even know if your bill of materials is priced accurately.  Not to mention the impacts on your cost of hourly labor.

Raw materials efficiency or lack thereof can make you feel traumatized and ready to tear your hair out trying to juggle inventory needs, contract obligations and deadlines and ultimately customer satisfaction.  The good news is that there is a better way forward.

But first, Is this you?.  Before implementing a shop floor control software solution we’ve seen our customers struggle in these three main areas:

1. Customer Satisfaction - ever find yourself with the wrong amount of a particular item needed to fulfill a customer’s contract?  And the worry that goes with knowing you have too little materials and how that will affect your customer approval ratings?
   

2. Profitability and Performance Concerns - inventory that is full of unusable items: too much of some items in the wrong colors or sizes needed with no idea of when/if you will actually use those items.  Now you have missed orders, money tied up in unusable inventory and what do the write offs look like when you have to liquidate the unused items? And is the bottom line affected?
   

3. Missed Customer Deadlines - if you actually begin a production order only to discover that your inventory is incorrect and now you must delay and/or stop production; how are customer deadlines affected?

Remember that good news promised?  Well, the answer to take you from chaos to calm is implementing shop floor control software with inventory management.  

This powerful combination provides real-time data to calculate manufacturing capacity, gives the management team immediate insight, allowing them to confidently plan orders.

The results are the alignment with multiple production schedules, minimized costs and inventory while increasing the accuracy of delivery commitments to customers changing your inventory process from chaos to calm.

When you are looking for a shop floor control software solution for your factory, be sure to evaluate the inventory management functionality.  It should include:

1.  Production Cut Order Planning

• Eliminate over and under production waste using lean production practices

• Lower costs and reduce time conflicts by optimizing manufacturing production runs 

• Improve customer satisfaction by giving reliable delivery dates based on actual availability of resources 

2.  Bill of Materials, BOM (Product Structure Records)

• By Style/Color/size, or plant with auto-substitution for size, color and plant

• Define the materials, components or process of each product

• Nest unlimited build levels and an unlimited number of components

• One BOM rather than many variations to create and maintain(Style/Color/Size)

 3.  Accurate, up-to-the-minute, inventory management

• Know what you have in-house, up-to-the-minute — from ASN (Advance Shipping Notification) to receipt to work-in-process to shipment

• Keep an automatic, high-resolution “paper trail” of all your transactions and activities

• Real-time accuracy through fully integrated bar-code printing and scanning 

You really can move from chaos to calm and completely change your inventory process by finding the best shop floor control software with inventory management.  Imagine no more, it’s yours for the taking: an easy to implement solution that allows you to improve customer satisfaction, overall plant performance, productivity and profitability.