Still Haven’t Digitized Your Manufacturing Firm’s Production Records?

Manufacturing Firm Production Records

If you haven’t digitized your production records yet, you’re missing out on the advantages it offers. Tacking important metrics becomes easier, which makes your firm more efficient.

The efficiency of your manufacturing firm’s processes is perhaps its most important quality. The more you and your workforce can accomplish, with greater accuracy and with the least possible resources, the better your profit margins will be.

That’s why it’s so important to understand how your firm executes each and every given task, in order to troubleshoot and improve it. However, how can you expect to improve your efficiency if you can’t even track it?

The #1 Problem With Conventional Production Records

Becoming more efficient isn’t easy when all you have to work with are hard-copy production records. Inputting, indexing and tracking data that are recorded manually on paper is a frustratingly outdated practice that some manufacturing firms continue to follow.

Issues with manual production record keeping include:

• Human Error
  Whether it’s illegible handwriting or an outright incorrectly recorded figure, human error is more pervasive in manual record keeping.
• Vulnerability
  Hard copy records are vulnerable to onsite emergencies including flooding and fires. If you don’t have duplicates stored in a separate location, your only records are at risk of being lost if something goes wrong.
• Time Commitment
  Filling out, sorting and storing these production records takes much more time than the modern alternative (explored below).

If the efficiency of your firm is truly a priority, then why would you accept these challenges in your production record-keeping process?

There’s a better way…

Your Firm Needs To Digitize Its Production Records

Digitizing your production records will help to mitigate and eliminate many of the obstacles you encounter with paper-based records, and allow you to gain new capabilities. The right manufacturing software will allow you and your workforce to input production record data into a digital system, automate processes that were otherwise manual, and gain a range of benefits:

1. Reduce The Rate Of Input Errors
   You can vastly reduce the amount of time you would normally spend reviewing documentation for human error and data integrity issues by digitizing the entire process, allowing you to ship your products much more quickly.
   
2. Reduce The Rate Of Deviations
   The right digital production record software will allow you to analyze vast amounts of data to spot any deviations and reduce the need to take corrective and preventative actions. This allows you to further optimize your manufacturing processes and cut back on time and money spent in addressing deviations.
   
3. Review & Release In Less Time
   Remember those issues with paper-based production records listed above? Going digital will allow you to eliminate those problems, which will only help to reduce time tables and help you get processes completed more quickly.

What Will Digital Production Records Do For Your Firm?

There are benefits to digitization beyond the most direct ones listed above. While digitizing your production records will increase data quality and decrease the time spent by your workforce maintaining those records, it will also provide you with more accurate data to support your high-level decision-making processes.

Every decision you make has an outcome; even on a fundamental level, for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. That’s why it’s so important to make well-informed decisions when it comes to your business.

With the right information, each choice you make can have attainable and expected positive results for your firm; without that information, you may as well be gambling with the future of your company.

Digitizing your production records gives you convenient access to a number of key metrics that play a significant role in the macro view of your firm’s efficiency. This falls under what’s known as “business intelligence”.

This idea is fairly simple – the more well informed you are, the more well informed your decisions will be. However, it’s important to note that information and intelligence are not the same thing.

By collecting your data into a single centralized repository via the manufacturing software you use for your production record keeping, it can be properly analyzed, identifying productivity and efficiency drains, performance spikes, and other notable events in your organization’s actions.

When executed properly, business intelligence is meant to convert your collected information into structured, analyzable insight. This means detailed reporting you can bring to a project team or board of directors’ meeting. It means less guesswork and more confident action.

Need Assistance Selecting The Right Software For Your Firm?

Acapella Technologies has extensive experience working with firms like yours in the manufacturing industry. We can assist in finding the right production record-keeping software for you, and in making sure it is carefully deployed and properly integrated with everything else your firm does.

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