5 Efficiency Boosters of JobPack’s Machine Scheduling Software – Shop Floor Management Software – JobPack

Efficiency—or lack thereof—can make or break a shop. JobPack gives manufacturers the tools to maximize it.

Every business looks for ways to stretch their resources further: to get more from their raw materials, find the optimal staffing formula, or perfectly choreograph a workflow so that no movements are wasted. When your industry is a competitive one and margins are slim, any competitive edge you can create becomes a crucial differentiator.

For manufacturers, production scheduling is a core battleground for fighting inefficiency. Jobs compete for your shop’s resources, and you choose how to distribute and sequence them. To make those choices well, manufacturers need two things: information, and the tools to interpret it. JobPack connects you with both.

JobPack’s real-time and historical visibility into your shop floor operations, paired with detailed analytical capabilities, offers a framework for significant efficiency wins. With JobPack, you can pinpoint opportunities for improvement, preempt problems, and run your shop floor smarter than ever. Here’s how.

1. Real-time shop floor visibility keeps you agile

Change is the only constant on a shop floor. Client needs shift, machines break down, staff availability fluctuates, supply orders fall through—and every variable affects your ability to stay on schedule. When change happens, shops need the ability to not only assess the new circumstances, but successfully pivot to a new strategy.

With JobPack’s real-time information, you always know what’s happening on the shop floor. You can see the status of each job and each machine, and get a clear picture of your utilization and available capacity. Use this information to swiftly absorb disruptions by switching jobs to a different machine, authorizing overtime work, or shuffling the schedule to keep delivery dates on track.

Real-time visibility also lets you quickly and confidently answer client questions like: 

• Can you take on another job? 
• What would the turnaround time be for this project? 
• When can I expect delivery?

And it can give you insight into gaps in your current schedule—convenient places to fit in another project, if the opportunity arises.

2. What-if scheduling gives you the confidence to act decisively

Of course, production schedulers will already be thinking that “shuffling the schedule” is easier said than done. That’s unquestionably true, and it’s also why JobPack’s Planning Board view exists. With the Planning Board, you can experiment with scheduling choices and see the outcomes of your changes—without affecting shop workflows in the meantime. 

Use the Planning Board to slot in potential new jobs, rearrange existing ones, and see the results instantly. No time needed for building out alternate schedules or agonizing over the possibilities—just quick answers to your questions. Find your optimal workflow and put it in motion.

3. Machine monitoring cuts down on surprises

As the saying goes, “if you don’t schedule maintenance, the equipment will schedule it for you.” In today’s world of tight margins, run to failure is rarely an option, but taking equipment out of service is expensive in both time and lost productivity. JobPack’s machine monitoring helps you find the right balance.

JobPack collects granular performance data from your shop floor equipment and makes it accessible in visual dashboards. With it, you can see when a machine’s productivity slows down, output quality degrades, or errors start to increase, and schedule maintenance to preempt a breakdown. Over time, you can gain insight into the cadence of maintenance each machine needs and create a proactive strategy that works around production and maximizes uptime.

Beyond maintenance needs, machine monitoring also gives you deep insight into the workflows around each piece of shop equipment. Time-stamped event logging lets you identify gaps and bottlenecks in the equipment’s day-to-day operation, which could highlight opportunities for optimizing shop floor processes.

4. Flexible integration gets your software stack synchronizing smoothly

For many businesses, production scheduling is only one piece of the digital puzzle. ERPs and other business intelligence software capture your organization’s data and provide tools to extract insight from it. Tie JobPack into this equation, and you add a rich data stream that can illuminate all-new facets of your overall business performance.

With JobPack’s detailed shop floor data, your organization can enhance a holistic view of your business. Uncover unexpected associations between specific suppliers and output quality, for example, or predict spikes in product demand and schedule accordingly. Utilize warehouse management data to streamline storage, retrieval, and ordering of raw materials. A higher-level view enables you to optimize a far wider range of business workflows.

Moreover, in some cases, integration also supports data synchronization across your software platforms. That means no need to enter data twice, and fewer opportunities to make a mistake—cutting back on costly errors, waste, and rework. 

5. Shop floor performance tracking supports in-depth analysis

Integration broadens the available data and insights that you can use to inform your shop floor decision-making, but even alone, JobPack’s data collection deepens your understanding of your shop’s performance. Track it over time with JobPack, and uncover trends and behaviors that help you anticipate needs, prevent errors, and solve problems before they start.

JobPack’s analytics give you the tools to identify variances in performance between shifts or machines, note when jobs run slower than expected, or pinpoint the impacts of staffing changes. Its level of detail streamlines root-cause analysis, so you can get to problem-solving faster. This kind of granular optimization leads to marginal gains that will, in the long run, stack up into an undeniable competitive edge.

Get even more out of your shop floor with JobPack.

Manufacturing is a competitive industry at the best of times. Now, with economic winds changing and supply chains in flux, maximizing the potential of your shop floor is more important than ever. Agility and efficiency will be key differentiators for businesses that can cultivate them.If you’re looking for a place to start, JobPack is your first step. A JobPack implementation moves quickly, much faster than the typical ERP, and begins delivering efficiency wins in just weeks. To see firsthand how JobPack works and learn more about what it can do for your shop floor, request a demo today.