What Is Shop Floor in Manufacturing?
The term shop floor refers to the area in a manufacturing facility where production is executed. This area includes all equipment, machines, and inventory.
What Is Shop Floor Management?
Since the shop floor in manufacturing includes numerous aspects, ranging from equipment to scheduling of staff, it’s crucial to maintain order of all elements involved. Without efficient planning, mistakes are likely to occur. This is where the role of Shop Floor Management comes in: a complete management and oversight of all production floor management and operations. This process can be completed via automation, such as shop floor control software, or with a team of staff.
Shop floor management is crucial for factories that are looking to optimize production. Operators can meet daily to review shop floor level management data and track machines, inventory, storage, and more, just to ensure there are no issues.
Though shop floor management techniques vary, one of the most important steps in this process is gathering accurate data. Whether it’s utilizing a software, or manually collecting data, the only way to gain from shop floor management is by using accurate numbers. An inaccurate representation of machine levels, job statuses, etc., could affect the whole production process.
What Are the Common Objectives of Shop Floor Management?
While each company may have different objectives of shop floor management, there is a common pattern to include the following important objectives in shop floor production:
- Arranging jobs on shop floor accordingly
- Tracking and fixing issues in production
- Proper scheduling of material jobs and workforce
- Aligning production jobs in the most optimized sequence
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Get eBookWhat Are the Benefits of Shop Floor Management?
Here are some of the most common benefits of shop floor management:
- Better data – Whether it’s utilizing automation, or creating an organized shop floor management plan, a smooth flow of data is key towards improvement on the production floor. This also includes easily pinpointing areas in the shop floor that need observation.
- Increased transparency – Shop floor management ensures accessibility and transparency to all data and insights occurring in the factory. This ease of access to data makes it simple for staff to find errors and decreases reaction time.
- Improved shop floor communication – Shop floor management is crucial for maintaining support across all departments. With one accessible platform to access all jobs, equipment status, and KPIs, there is less error in communication and increased productivity amongst staff.
