How your shop floor ERP can save your workers a lot of hassle

Your shop floor workforce is a key part of your enterprise. Whether they are welding, painting, soldering or dicing, they want to do good work in an efficient manner. Your ERP can help them make high quality products on time.

Lose the paper dispatch report

ERPs can save you valuable time when it comes to managing customer demands. Use electronic media to let them know the next job to start work on. When they finish an operation, ERP can look at what jobs are at their station now and which of those is most important to start next. ERP can also estimate that another job will arrive soon, and that it is best to simply wait for that job as it is most critical.

Lose the paper copy of the drawing

Show them the current drawing on a monitor right at their workstation. They can move around the drawing as needed and zoom to any point to see exactly what the engineer wanted done. That paper copy took a long time to print and the printer was way across the plant so there was a good chance they could use an obsolete drawing unknowingly.

Recommended reading: find a shop floor ERP to suit your workforce with our completely up-to-date ERP vendor guide.

Lose the pile of work in the way at any workstation

Work piles up when work is wrongly prioritized, when the schedule calls for faster processing than is currently possible. That pile of work on pallets can also be a safety hazard if a worker has to step over it to get to a work station. If an operation is taking more time than scheduled, send an alert to maintenance and manufacturing engineering from the ERP right now. Fix the problem before it becomes a big problem. Reschedule upcoming jobs to other resources until the problem is gone.

Use the right kind of interface

There might not be enough space at a workstation to use a keyboard and mouse, so give shop floor workers a touch screen. If that work station has a dusty environment and the employee needs to wear gloves on the job, set up a voice interface. Shop floor personnel don’t have nice office desks, but their work is essential for the success of your company. Help them. Make sure your ERP is configured so that they can do their job as quickly as possible.

Make sure those shop floor people know they have the most current information from the ERP, and that they are working on the best possible schedule. When an impatient salesman visits to insist they work on his customer’s job, they can confidently let him know where to go.

Include training on the shop ERP schedule

Shop floor personnel must be current on all their training and certifications. When they need a refresher, allow time and make the scheduled training visible to the worker as well as the boss.

The shop floor modules of your ERP provide many tools right out of the box and, if needed, they can be integrated with tools and machinery to make life easier for these important people and provide your customers with better products and service.