Job Planning

Somewhere between the creating the quote, entering the sales order, and completing the job, lies the responsibility of Job Planning or Production Control. Verifying the accuracy of the router, the bill of materials, determining material availability, notifying purchasing of shortages, checking production schedules to see if resources are available to meet the required ship dates ...

This is a critical step in the work flow of your operations. Potential problems identified now can avoid costly mistakes during production.

Communication

How do you tie it all together? How does sales order entry notify Production Control that a firm order is now ready for production? Typical manufacturing capacity planning software handles production well, but often lacks an efficient communication system between work groups and departments. With JobOps job shop tracking software and the MAS 90 or MAS 200 Business Alerts Module, communications between your different work groups can be automated.

JobOps tracks status changes to the work tickets. When a status change is detected by the Business Alerts module, it automatically sends and e-mail to the next person in line responsible for the job. In other words, as soon as the sales order is entered, Production Control is immediately notified that they can begin checking the order before the job is released for work.

Tracking of Original, Revised, and Actual Costs

With capabilities beyond simple job logging and tracking software, JobOps is an integrated ERP and MRP system, combining the features of manufacturing enterprise resource planning software with flexible budgeting software for manufacturing firms.

JobOps also allows you to track the impact on job costs that result from necessary Production Control changes. The estimated job costs from materials, labor and services that were entered either as a quote or a sales order can be tracked against the revisions made by production control. When work on the job begins, the actual costs are tracked separately from the original estimates and the revised estimates.

The result is that if your profits have been less than expected, you now have better visibility as to where the issues lie. Is estimating being overly optimistic about costs? Is Production Control unrealistic about how much work can get done in a day? Or, are the actual production operations not running as efficiently as possible? Using JobOps to compare the original costs from your estimators to the revised costs of production control to the actual costs reported from the job gives you better visibility and more management control to improve your operations.