Manual Data Collection for ERP is costly: Multi-plant molder saves 5000 man-hours per year with automated manufacturing data collection.

Problem: In this 7 plant manufacturing operation, production operators, supervisors and support personnel manually tracked, tabulated and reported daily production counts to ERP. At 4 labor hours per day, per facility, this activity expended a total of 7000 essentially unproductive labor hours per year.

Solution: ProductionACE with MDT-150 system was installed and integrated to the corporate ERP solution. The integration imports daily production schedules for each machine into ProductionACE's visual Job Queue. Production runtime, downtime, part and rejects counts are then automatically tracked, then at the end of each shift production results are summarized for management to verify and edit the data. Once approved, the information is exported to ERP.

Bottom Line Results: The daily effort to maintain the ERP solution was reduced to less than 1 hour per day per plant. Because the counts are automatically created for export, keystroke errors are eliminated and updates to the ERP system occur on a much more timely basis, allowing for improved planning and inventory accuracy. It was estimated that there was a labor savings of 5000 man-hours per year.