Manufacturing industry is the driving force behind some great economies. They are labor intensive in the old days, but is gradually becoming lean and effective as new technologies are being used on the production line. I remember my two year stint in a dry cell manufacturing plant where the production area uses a combination of technologies like PLCs, photo-eyes, label printing, browser based data collection, RF hand held intelligent devices, smart phones, PDAs, barcode scanners, robotics, and a variety of software to consolidate and track the whole operation. This makes manufacturing environment very tough and competitive.

Production control software plays a vital part in the management of every aspect of plant process through a simple friendly user interface. This specifically addresses the minute scheduling needs of demand driven manufacturing process. This is especially true in consumer products manufacturers wherein there is a strong need on usability, visibility and collaborative planning for any production software to succeed. The specialized system is more powerful and easier to use than a spreadsheet, which enables production plant plans and schedules to updated quickly based on the actual progress of the production floor. Progress could be monitored hourly, daily or weekly where data could be changed anytime to reflect the actual performance of materials, labor and equipment capacity.

The production software tool is used by management to control various aspects of the day-to-day operation; thus, it needs to be flexible to cope up with the fast changes in plans, schedules and actual challenges. Software like this features a simple approach for getting results fast and have tight integration with other systems. Production control software encompasses advanced planning and scheduling, integration of the supply chain, management of the production floor and more.

This kind of software provides real time and historical production performance feedback to the management and employees. The system collects production data and creates reports that are vital to good decision making. The reports include process settings, quality assurance information, machine downtime and maintenance activity, and more.

I have observed that the software aid management in gaining more detailed control of the production process which resulted to eventually improve efficiency of the entire production plant. Production control software as I see it have made manufacturing faster, more efficient, and boosted production levels.