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Shop Floor Tracking
Within any manufacturing process, the state of progress of the various elements of an order should be visible. Particularly for a bespoke order where those parts are particular to that order, the constituent parts must be so identified.
By identifying parts and subassemblies with bar codes, and scanning these at various stages of a process, the progress of an order can be made visible, in turn forming the basis of client/management reporting (where is such and such an order ?) and decisions such as scheduling via user interfaces designed specifically for those purposes.
On bar-coding items of stock picked for an order, these can then be identified not only with the materials requirements generated from the RTIS quoting/order modules, but also with the manufacturing processes each part needs to undergo as a result of the specification of that order. The operator can now identify a part with its order and view the required specification or operation it must undergo. This information can be scanned into a machine in order to remove manual setup time.
Depending on the nature of the process, tracking right from the quote through the purchasing and warehousing functions through the manufacturing and dispatch can give full visibility of order progress, and immediately highlight and inform any action required as a result of bottlenecks, fall downs, or any other factor.
This is an example of using data generated as a normal result of shop floor operations and feeding it back into the decision making and reporting job roles from any point within an integrated system. The RTIS approach emphasizes building user interfaces around the job roles you describe to us.
These various user interfaces then interact with the available data, within RTIS modules or others, via an object level of the software which incorporates your own business rules. One advantage of this tiered structure (data - object layer - user interfaces) is that we can make changes either to each layer without interrupting the operation of the others .