Shop Floor Data Collection (SFDC) is a superb ERP feature that can make your life so much easier as a production manager or business owner.

Fraction ERP offers free Shop Floor Data Collection because we think it is so important for manufacturing business to embrace. But, what is it? In short it allows your production staff to log onto production orders and capture both time and quantities completed. Many ERP systems charge for these licenses, we include them with our standard subscriptions (you can check out our pricing page to learn more).

Let us share with you four reasons why your business needs this tool.

1. Save time tracking production orders

When you use Shop Floor Data Collection, you gain the ability to track your production orders in real time. No more hunting around the shop floor to find out where your orders are. If you are a production manager, or need to regularly find out where your customers orders are, you'll know how many hours per day you spend on this alone. We know from personal experience that running around the shop floor gets in the way of doing bigger and better things for the business.

In Fraction ERP we tie this into our high level operations tracker. Shop Floor Data Capture can save you and your team hours per day. That's a pretty good reason on its own!

Shop floor tracking on a tablet, using Fraction ERP

2. Gain visibility of who is doing what

How many times have you wondered what the team are working on?

When your shop floor team use Shop Floor Data Collection to log on and off jobs, you gain instant visibility of who is doing what.

In Fraction ERP, we have a screen dedicated to this. Click onto the SFDC page and all of your staff, and what they are working on, is listed out.

3. Finding out how profitable you are

When you cost jobs for your quoting process, you use the best information you have available to you.

Using Shop Floor Data Capture, you capture actual setup and run times. This allows you to review the jobs once they have been completed to check that your labour times are in line with what you predicted (or better).

In Fraction ERP we have a dedicated report just for this purpose.

Shop Floor Data Capture logs, showing production variances

4. Improve your scheduling activities

When you capture actual running and setting up time, you can determine what your real resource utilisation figures are. Utilisation, if you aren't familiar, is the amount of spent on productive work. High utilisations are what we are striving for. We want our equipment and staff working on delivering products for our customers, not stopped due to problems.

However, knowing where we are is key to directing our continuous improvement projects and making our production schedules more accurate.

If you plan for 100% utilisation and you only have 75%, your production schedules will be unrealistic. I'm sure you get the idea. Shop Floor Data Collection can allow you to find out this information and allow for better scheduling, which in turn can reduce your overtime bills and improve on time delivery performance (and hence customer satisfaction).

Simple visual scheduling is at the heart of Fraction ERP.

I hope these four points convince you of the benefits of using Shop Floor Data Collection. The reason we include it as part of our standard subscription is that we didn't want any of our customers to have to decide if they wanted to pay for it. We know that it is vital for a manufacturing business if they want to get the most out of their ERP system, hence our decision.

If you want to learn more about Fraction ERP, then check out our features page or sign up for a free demo using the form below. We also offer a free trial account so that you can really test out Fraction ERP and see if it is a good fit for your business.