A project management blog for manufacturing and engineering
What does it take to update your shop for the 2020’s? (see video below for answer)
All you need are a few barcode labels and a scanner. $50 on Amazon. And Standard Time® manufacturing software. Give that a try before you bring in the robots.
Chromebook tablets and laptops work great as inexpensive barcode scanning stations. Deploy them anywhere on the shop floor, or even at each workbench. Just connect to the Standard Time® cloud by Wi-Fi and start scanning. This video shows how. It also shows how to speak as an alternative to scanning.
Send a link to your production manager!
Chasing the status of jobs and work orders on the shop floor? Well… you know… “there’s an app for that” as they used to say in the 2000’s. Or was that the 1990’s?
That app is Standard Time. It can chase jobs status for you.
ST has a “Work in Progress” WIP screen that shows the latest status of every job. Put a 60″ TV up on the wall, and everybody can see the latest job status.
This short video may act as inspiration to try it. 🙂
Even a fat-fingered welder can track time with barcodes. So there’s no excuse for missing work orders, unknown job status, or who-knows-where-that-job-went excuses. Just grab a barcode scanner and clock in!
To be fair, welders have some of the best hand-eye coordination of all human beings — fat-fingered or not. It’s the engineers that can’t tell their butts from a butt weld. So really, barcode time tracking is good for everyone!
One more for the road: Why do they only give welders ten minute breaks? Any longer and they’d have to retrain them. 🙂
Want an enterprise resource planner without paying a million dollars and then signing up for another million-dollar implementation schedule? It is possible.
Have you considered Standard Time?
This little video may inspire you to give it a try. We’ll even help you out, without the million dollars. 🙂
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!