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Automating Shop Floor Manufacturing Operations

Take control of your shop floor operations

To manufacture goods today, you have to track and manage all of your manufacturing resources to stay competitive. These resources could include raw materials (components), finished goods, quality control processes, and labor (or labor teams.) In some cases, the challenge is not just a competitive situation, but a mission critical operation. The management team needs information in a real time mode to plan for all events.

Tracking and managing these resources, as well as forecasting and scheduling resources, can be a daunting task in a dynamic manufacturing environment. However, successful manufacturing companies do track and manage all of their resources to determine exact costs of raw materials and labor, to insure their manufacturing processes are working properly, and to reduce scrap costs. The ultimate goal is to reduce costs and to manufacture a quality-built product that is competitively priced. Other important goals would be to meet or exceed any compliance standards and be able to prove it.

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Nothing Short of Perfection in Shop Floor Operations

Successful Manufacturing Using ASCTrac® Shop Floor Module

At the operations level, successful companies must be able to track and instantly report lot and serial numbers (both for components and finished goods), track actual labor consumption (and total paid time), support multiple plant sites, perform required QC checks, and do this without adding extensive manual processes or overhead. In some cases, they must also be able to support traceability and compliance standards as directed by regulatory agencies (such as FDA, NDC, DEA, etc.)

Shop floor scheduling by machine or multi-routing of machines to match capacities or line constraints can be done using our visual scheduler. Planners can drag-and-drop “what-if” scenarios for planning production runs per line, and if they like the proposed change, click one time to create the plan.

At the manufacturing work cell level, these processes must be repeatable and propagated throughout all of the work cells in a multi-plant or distributed global environment. Global companies may even have off-site manufacturers to provide a special function (or entire assembly process) and need to track the goods through that step. And most importantly, they need to manufacture using excellent manufacturing standards.

Who Uses The ASCTrac® Shop Floor Solutions?

ASC’s ASCTrac® Shop Floor Module is used by successful companies to manage resource and component traceability, schedule production lines and work cells, schedule to machine capacities, manage detailed quality controls and testing, and all of these operations are visible in real-time on a global scale.

Typical manufacturing industries using the ASCTrac® Shop Floor Module are manufacturers of food and beverage, pharmaceuticals (including narcotics and controlled substances), medical devices, consumer packaged goods, electronics, and the automotive industry.

One of our unique features is that our solution is designed for both process and discrete manufacturing, and these can be intermixed depending upon the item or sub-assembly setup. Therefore, fluid product manufacturers could also do mixed-mode manufacturing and support silos of liquid components.

Just a Few of the ASCTrac® Shop Floor Module Features:

  • Trace warranty and repairs history for the complete life cycle of serialized products (both components and finished goods)
  • Create shop floor routings combined with Bill of Materials and by "active" revision.
  • Flexible deployment options - PC, tablet, mobile device, or industrial shop floor terminals
  • Fully integrated auto-ID technologies for verification

Just a Few of the ASCTrac® Shop Floor Module Benefits:

  • Track the actual components and component lots consumed per each work cell (pharma grade)for exact batch costing
  • Supports lean accounting methods for process manufacturers
  • Track finished goods lot traceability (pharma grade) with instant FDA type reports
  • Track serial numbered components to finished serial numbered devices with life-time history(such as medical devices)
  • Multipath work cells on production lines are supported
  • Track actual labor costs, scrap costs, and total run times per work cell
  • View all site operations real-time and use visual schedulers with capacity constraints
  • Built-in Quality Control processes that you define combined with QC Hold rules by item
  • Eliminate the manual processes of data entry into forms or other manual processes
  • ASC has years of experience in shop floor manufacturing to assist you
  • Flexible deployment types
  • Fully integrated auto-ID technologies to verify items including mobile devices
  • Fully audited transactions, and fully reportable via user-defined reports for proof of execution
  • Off-site production work cells are supported

(-- These are highlights as there are too many BENEFITS to list. --)

Connecting the Dots in Your Supply Chain®

ASC modules graphic
ASCTrac is a Complete Supply Chain Solution:

To ensure that you can fully orchestrate every point in your supply chain, the modular ASCTrac system can provide a complete solution to connect every portion of your supply chain, and you can choose which modules you need.

ASCTrac can be a Complementary Supply Chain Module:

The ASCTrac system can provide a modular and complimentary solution to connect to your existing ERP system. When your ERP cannot handle all of your supply chain challenges, choose the right combination for solving those complex needs.

You Need Real Time Information:

You cannot manage what you cannot see - to ensure that you are fully connected to your supply chain in real time, the ASCTrac system can provide visibility to your entire supply chain - true management in a proactive and predictive mode.

Trusted data:

All processes and movements of goods are double-checked and verified at the point of activity. Everything is tracked and audited with pharmaceutical grade precision. Real Time, 100% accurate data that is trusted.

Distribution - Connect, Plan, Optimize and Execute

Since ASCTrac WMS is considered in the industry as a “best of breed” (best-in-class) system (which means it was purposely built and designed as a true distribution and manufacturing system from the operations perspective), it can handle all variations of distribution and manufacturing for any type of industry for any size of enterprise. Therefore, all operations are planned, accurate, visible in real time, and completely verified. This includes all transactions (such as receipts, picks, moves, physical counts, cycle counts, repacks, scraps, quality control holds and releases, parcel shipping, trailer shipping, etc.) at the point of activity for directed workflows. That means instant reconciliation if a picking error occurs, or verification for a purchase order receipt, etc., to ensure that the financial system is fully correct.

WMS Selection Hint: Be sure when comparing WMS products to make sure that the one you choose is not just a “data collection” module used as data entry method for an accounting system. Some systems are marketed as “WMS” when they are just simple data collection modules with no optimization. Choose a WMS that is designed by supply chain professionals to meet your most complex needs.

With all of the management side of the warehouse at stake, (i.e., labor resources, location utilization, rapid picks, zone control, ABC logic, throughput capacities, burden costs, planning, ASN/EDI, etc.), the deployment of ASCTrac® simply makes good management sense.

Award-winning Solutions

As a best-of-breed WMS, ASC has been honored to receive awards such as “Top 100 Logistics IT Solution Providers” in the world (again in 2021, over 18 years running), “Best-in-Class Design for Wireless Infrastructure,” “Top 10 Warehouse Management Solution Providers,” and the “Microsoft® Pinnacle Award” for our dedication to innovative solutions, unparalleled customer support, and top-notch customer service.

(Best-of-Breed and Best-in-Class are Gartner categories for WMS systems.)

Top
Inbound logistics
100
logistics it providers
2021

Do You Have Big ERP and Still Have Complex Inventory Challenges?

🡒 If you rely on a BIG ERP to solve complex inventory challenges, you may be disappointed to discover that it does not properly handle all of your department’s complex inventory movements.

🡒 In fact, you may be relying on Excel spread sheets to run your supply chain by owning BIG ERP.

Why? It’s because BIG ERPs were designed primarily as financial systems and not as supply chain systems. For intense supply chain needs, most big ERPs’ cannot handle complex operations such as interleaved complex inbound logic, multi-drop inbound logic, flexible sequenced priorities, dynamic wire guided vehicle directives, or other complex supply chain logic that must work 100% efficiently with manufacturing or in the mission-critical warehouse.

This is where we can help you with experienced and flexible “best-of-breed” off-the-shelf supply chain solutions that can do what you need. We can provide the experience and the solution for solving those complex needs with connected ERP interfaces to securely and accurately exchange information. Give us the tough stuff, your ERP handles the financials.

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