One of the most important things to understand about manufacturing software is that no two options are created equally. Yes, they’re all designed for businesses LIKE yours – but depending on what you’re trying to accomplish, they may not be the right fit given your long-term strategy.
For example: if continuous improvement is one of your major focuses as a manufacturer and as a business professional, there are a number of key features you’ll want to make sure any manufacturing software you choose to invest in includes.
Critical Features for Your Manufacturing Software: Breaking Things Down
Obviously, as a manufacturer, one of your top priorities always involves keeping every last piece of equipment on your shop floor up and running for as long as possible. Therefore, it makes sense that the number one feature you want to look for in manufacturing software comes by way of some form of comprehensive downtime tracking functionality.
Remember that downtime tracking is about more than just gaining an understanding of your line’s efficiency. It’s also your key to instantly learning the cause, the length and even the frequency of downtime events – including small ones like those micro starts and stops that you may not have been paying attention to but that are costing huge amounts of time and money just the same.
Not only that, but innovative solutions like Thrive take this one step further by using a unique algorithm to calculate the impact on uptime and production each downtime event WOULD have had if it had been fixed. So not only will you know what your biggest source of downtime is right now, but you’ll also be able to see the major advantages you’ll achieve if you set your mind to fixing it, too.
These days, another one of the most important features to look for in manufacturing software has to do with dashboards that take all of your complicated, high volume data and distill it down into a series of visual charts that literally anyone in your business can understand. You should be able to log into this dashboard from any device on Earth with an active Internet connection thanks to the cloud, and you should be able to access and print a performance snapshot anytime, anywhere, no exceptions. At any given moment, you should never be more than just a few quick mouse clicks away from seeing your equipment’s efficiency, your historical performance, operator comments and more – all in any date range that you choose.
Speaking of date ranges, your manufacturing software should also offer historical performance dating back days, weeks, months or even years if you so choose. Then and only then will you be able to learn what the past is trying to tell you in order to build a much more successful (not to mention profitable) future for your organization.
To find out more about all of the important features that your manufacturing software needs to be able to provide, or to get answers to any other important questions that you may have, please don’t delay – contact Thrive today.
