A project management blog for manufacturing and engineering
Have a warehouse? No? How about material racks? In any case, it’s easy to track inventory usage with barcodes. Just scan your name and the SKU. That item is now deducted from stock. Geez, that was simple.
Watch the video below for inspiration.
It turns out Standard Time® will also reorder inventory when it drops below a certain level. You get an email, and in some cases new materials show up at your back door the next day. That’s just in time inventory with Standard Time.
Rolling a “percentage” rock up a hill? Yeah, it sort-of makes sense. It’s a metaphor for working to increase your percentages. Okay, I get that, but percentages of what? And, what am I doing to increase those percentages?
Scroll down for a little inspiring video.
First, the percentages are your manufacturing efficiencies. I.e. how efficient you are at producing products. And second, you are working to improve your manufacturing efficiencies. So how do you do that?
Automation.
We suggest barcoding everything. Every work order. Every step in the process. Every consumable material. And every task employees perform. Now you can analyze that information for clues to inefficiencies.
Find those inefficiencies, and you improve your percentages. You’re rolling the percentage rock up the hill!
Turns out, you can scan a lot of things on the shop floor. But why? Well… to track work orders, employee hours, materials, inventory coming in and out, and a few other goodies.
In other words, automate the shop floor.
What’s WIP? Work In Progress. By scanning the items above, you get a nice dashboard of your work in progress, also known as WIP. You see the jobs in progress, and who’s working on them. Use that to predict completion times, communicate to sales, shipping, and clients.
As Bill Gates used to say, Information at your fingertips! Or… on the shop wall. 🙂
One of the best things you can do to save manufacturing admin time is barcodes.
Here’s why: Most shops report their employee time with handwritten timesheets. Workers fill in a sheet for their week and hand it to their supervisors. Have you considered replacing that step with scanning barcodes instead?
You save the minutes and hours that accumulate in filling them out, and you save the human error that results from attempts to remember work performed. You also save transcription mistakes when reentering the hours into other software. Just scan and go!
Barcodes are the best!
Your family and friends know your awesome. But show your coworkers you are!
Your employees can now tell you what their doing by simply scanning barcodes. That means you’ll have up-to-the-minute status of jobs, work orders, orders, and employees. Just scan and go in Standard Time®.
Here’s a fascinating idea! Set up a completely unmanned manufacturing shop. That’s right! Entirely automated, without employees, without human resources. Standard Time® can help when you’re ready.
Investing in CNC milling is a great investment for your manufacturing shop. But have you considered using Standard Time in connection with it?
What’s Standard Time?
It’s how you track jobs going through your shop. And how you track employee hours. And Work In Progress (WIP). Hopefully, the little video below will inspire you to try ST. Buy a barcode scanner, and use it to track work orders that travel through the shop. Let us know if we can help! 🙂
Manufacturers! Start the New Year using barcodes. Exactly how, you ask?
By scanning them to track time and materials.
Turns out, employees can scan work orders to start a timer. When they stop that timer, you have collected the hours worked and status for that job. All with just a few scans. No computer. No software. No sitting in front of a terminal with dirty hands. Just scan and go!
Watch the video and contact us for info!
Checking inventory in and out of stock is as easy as a barcode scan. Watch the guy in this video, then download Standard Time®.
Let us know if scanning turned out as easy as this video!