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We’re helping more than 400 factories through their digital transformation to improve processes and get real-time insights from their business.

Business Description

Managing an engineering shop floor is not an easy task. When you start your business, you may be able to manage with spreadsheets and regular meetings and conversations. However, as you grow, shop floor management becomes more and more difficult, as you take on more jobs, more machines, and more staff. Shop floor management software helps managers to gain control of their business processes to master the shop floor.

What’s on the shop floor

Now, we should clarify what we mean by shop floor management. Thankfully, the concrete flooring doesn’t need a performance review every 6 months! No, by shop floor management, we’re talking about the following:

• Goods in & deliveries
• Stock management & stores
• Jobs to production
• Job planning
• Machine maintenance
• Printing (and keeping track of) job cards
• Inspections
• Audits
• Quality management
• Goods out
• And... well, pretty much any activity that happens on the shop floor.

So, as you can see, there’s quite a lot to do. You can easily see how this can be difficult to manage even by the time you have 5 machines, 10 staff and a consistent order book.

What can you do to help?

There are of course a lot of tools that you can use to manage this myriad of complex processes. The one you probably already have in place is spreadsheets. Spreadsheets are flexible and fantastic to use... for a while.

To be fair, spreadsheets can be used for all of the tasks mentioned above. You can convert emails into spreadsheets so you can tick off what’s delivered on an order. You can create a stock list, print it off and tick off items you’ve got, and you can even create a basic production schedule and audits on them. Spreadsheets are nothing if not versatile. But, they’re anything but perfect.

Spreadsheets are a great when you first make something, but as soon as you need to edit it and add a field, save a new version, send a copy to someone for changes, you can end up with lots of different versions that leaves you searching for the right one for hours.

The biggest issue is probably with scheduling. At the start of the week, you’ll probably put together your production schedule, and be happy with it. Then, come 10am Monday morning, a machine breaks down, a person calls in sick, or a customer calls to make changes to the job, and you have to start again from scratch.

When there’s only a few of you, this is ok. You can mention these changes to the engineers, annotate the schedule, and be relatively confident that mistakes won’t be made. But it’s not the ideal way, and can you really take that risk as your business grows?

A smarter way to manage your shop floor

At Fitfactory, we’re always looking for a more intelligent way to do things. From big transformations to incremental improvements. Maybe it’s a simple as using spreadsheets on tablets rather than printing them off. This way, when you do your stock checks, you’re only entering the data once, so there’s no chance of mis-reading that oil smudged 6 as an 8 and messing up your next orders. Or maybe it’s implementing sensors on your machines to track OEE and help you save costs where it matters.

Whatever it is, we’re always looking for smarter ways to manage your shop floor. So, we wanted to share a few ideas with you about how you can do this cost effectively:

1.     Adopt Production Control Software

Production control software is needed by almost every business in the manufacturing industry nowadays. This is the hub for your shop floor management. Everything flows through this. It’s where you keep your customer details, job details, inventory levels, BOM management, supplier management and more.

Using a production control system has proven to improve accuracy of work, minimise non-productive time, improve data integrity, and profitable financial statements of course.

Most importantly, the market has evolved greatly from where it was even 10 years ago. Now, there’s a lot of options available that can be configured to the needs of your business – we offer 2 ourselves. For whether you work in manufacturing or treatments! If you browse the market, there’s lots of options available.

If you’re interested in learning how to choose one, check out the Fitfactory Blog for more information.

2.     Streamline communication

Communication is essential in any machining shop, as your engineers need to know what to work on next, the drawing instructions for jobs, and any last-minute updates. But communication is also important the other way, so that management is made aware of any issues or regulatory concerns, as well being up to date with general day-to-day operations.

Verbal communication is always a great place to start, but it can be time consuming to walk round and ask people for updates. Also, it’s difficult to communication job instructions in this way.

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