Shop Floor Data Capture and Reporting

Many manufacturing businesses are acknowledging the need to move away from pen and paper in their operation, to create a more 'visual' factory, and display performance information 'on the floor'.

Tools and applications exist now that we would have loved to have had 30 years ago in our operation at Honda, where we relied upon very basic displays and only one or two digital output displays - literally output. Nowadays you can get much, much more.

There's no shortage of technology vendors selling all kinds of 'solutions', but what is right to capture and display for your operation?

Use this short article to inform your decision making when considering your next step on your 'lean journey'.

“In God we trust. All others must bring data!”

This quote by W. Edwards Deming refers to the importance of data measurement and analysis when doing business.

In manufacturing any product to satisfy a customer need there is always a cost involved, and a time by which this need should be fulfilled. To succeed in winning more business, employing and investing in people on good rates of pay, and generating profit, a company will make plans; these plans will set out what needs to be done, at what cost and by when, in order to satisfy the customer and make a profit.

The principal aim of Shop Floor Data capture [SFDC] is to capture performance against the manufacturing elements of these plans, to enable both reporting of variances, and analysis of performance to identify opportunities for improvement.

It perhaps helps to have a definition like this - since there isn't one [before the one we created here] that we have found - business schools take note. So far, so good. Except most SFDC solutions we see simply don't do that.

AA built an SFDC application because we saw that vendors, for all their technological knowhow, didn't understand operations. Meanwhile, operations people have tried to specify solutions without really understanding what they need, or what is technically possible. The "blind leading the blind".

Examples

Factory A recognised the need to improve operating performance, and embarked on a journey of continuous improvement. We saw displays of OEE % on lovely digital displays, and a side 'improvement' room where daily huddles would congregate around kpi boards and project displays.

This all looked fabulous, except less than 1% of the operators could tell you what that OEE % meant, what they could do to move the number, what number was a good number or a bad number, what it was actually worth, and so on. Knowledge barely improved through the management hierarchy.

Worse, senior management believed this stuff was cutting edge, was a key part of their 'lean transformation', and was crucial to sustaining operating performance.

Factory B had cracked that conundrum, yet the reality was the vast majority of reports used by management to review and drive performance was done via MS Excel reporting - and involved a huge amount of work to arrive at 'one source of truth', often long after there was any ability to affect the result.

Dig under the surface of that and we find a piecemeal solution. The production planning is done on a bespoke system, with a separate forecast done in Excel, order entry on another system, accounts done on another, production and and QA data capture on another. Nothing integrated with anything else, hence the trouble with getting to that one source of truth.

Choose wisely?

It is not enough simply to capture [and display] the activity in manufacturing, such as output, product characteristics, or even efficiency. Such capture is meaningless without comparison to a plan, a target, or a standard of some sort, since without such comparison we are unable to determine whether performance is good, bad or indifferent, and we are similarly unable to identify opportunity for improvement.

Hence, a good SFDC Application takes the opportunity to communicate the plans, targets and standards directly to those at the front line of manufacturing and eliminate the typical paperwork that entails. Moreover, we then make it possible to automate both the capture of performance and crucially, highlight ‘live’ variances to targets and plans.

?In addition, a good SFDC Application should be adapted for Clients to facilitate the flexibility the operation needs to be efficient. This includes the ability to update and reissue production schedules, to group and highlight similar product types, to transfer products across lines, and to manually add orders to the schedule, all directly from the floor.

Other great features should include colour coding where data entries have been missed, break controls, downtime coding, automated variance calculation, progress status, and estimated completion times. There is also technical quality compliance functionality built in, so that audit compliance checks are integral to the operation, and reports generated automatically.

The good SFDC Application should also be a great platform for further development, being both scalable and flexible.

Richard Shipperbottom is the co-founder of leading supply chain and operations consultancy Applied Acumen Limited, and may be contacted for advice on SFDC and other operating system solutions.