5 questions for metal stampers to guide ERP in 2022

Inefficient data collection processes and a lack of visibility into your stamping operations can hamper shop floor decision-making.

Inefficient data collection processes and a lack of visibility into your stamping operations can hamper shop floor decision-making, erode performance, and undermine your bottom line.

The collection of analytical feedback about operations has been a chronic problem for stamping manufacturers for as long as there has been stamping. The problem is about more than just data collection, and the solution isn’t to get more data. It’s about having the right data, in the right format, and with context that makes it understandable.

It’s also about visibility and good systems. Owners and managers need to know what’s going on right now, on the shop floor. The challenge of data collection is the result of flawed systems, not flawed people.

Asking yourself five questions may guide your enterprise resource plan (ERP) next year.

1. Is our plant achieving its strategic goals?

If your ERP includes machine purchases or an expanded workforce, you should know how it helps meet your strategic goals, including:

If your ERP includes machine purchases or an expanded workforce, you should know how it helps meet your strategic goals, including:

• Current overall plant profitability.

1. Operator turnover rate and engagement.

• Alignment between production forecasts and production reality.

1. Typical bid/estimate accuracy.

So, is your plant achieving its goals? If the answer is “yes,” then congratulations. If the answer is “no,” you need to keep asking yourself questions.

2. Do our operators feel engaged and empowered?

Operators are doing the best they can to share information quickly and accurately into the ERP or other systems—and managers are trying to keep tabs on every job running on every machine, often manually. But is that info efficient and exact?

There is one easy way to gauge whether your operators feel engaged: turnover. In today’s incredibly challenging hiring environment, it’s important to engage and empower the employees you have, making it easier for them to feel like they truly are part of a winning team.

When your plant constantly struggles to keep operators, it could be because employees feel a lack of control over their performance and frustration around trying to share tribal knowledge—information they know is true but can’t quantify.

One of the most remarkable benefits of better manufacturing intelligence is a better culture. In too many manufacturing operations, operators rely on bad data, observation, and even guesswork to figure out what is going wrong on a shop floor. While they are committed to performance, they don’t have the information they need to succeed. That is frustrating at best—defeating at worst.

Adjustments and corrections become impossible without data-driven insight. Providing operators with the opportunity to play a role in creating the real-time data you need to run your business more efficiently can change behaviors and improve the culture almost overnight. When they have full visibility into performance and challenges, they will also see what action to take for improvements.

When data drives action, every member of the team feels empowered to make an impact. And that can lead to improvements across the job shop. Plus, when your operators are not spending precious time looking for information, but rather are focused on their performance, the ripple effect can deliver double-digit improvements.

3. When did we last take a deep dive into our plant floor data to see what's going on?

Too many of today’s stamping shop floors suffer from an abundance of complexity that can make what should be a simple task—like collecting data from your machines—a lot harder than it should be.

Too many of today’s stamping shop floors suffer from an abundance of complexity that can make what should be a simple task—like collecting data from your machines—a lot harder than it should be.

Adding more machines, people, or monitoring devices won’t remove the complexity. Before you invest in more people and more machines, take the time to understand the reasons for unacceptable utilization rates, excess waste, and poor machine output before making an investment decision. Otherwise, you may end up with the same result—like a baseball team replacing a player after suffering a losing year without ever having analyzed why or how that player contributed to the team’s record.

In baseball, managers call smart use of data “moneyball.” In manufacturing, managers call smart use of data “survival.”

True manufacturing intelligence provides owners and managers with a clear view of essential metrics—such as setup and run hours, machine uptime compared to the target, jobs, and operations by work center—and allows them to discern between efficiency and utilization. Those are two key elements of a smart, productive, profitable manufacturing operation.

One challenge is that more data is not necessarily usable data. With useful manufacturing intelligence, data is aggregated from all sources, formatted, and visually presented in a way that makes it easy for every staff member in your business to see what they need to know—and move forward. No more guessing, no more days-long waits for information.

The bottom line is that stampers fail when they don’t have the data-driven insight they need to better understand and improve performance on the shop floor.

4. How do we collect data in our plant?

Unfortunately, many shops require operators to remember and enter information into a terminal long after they’ve had to solve a host of problems, keep their machines running, and meet production goals. Operators are asked to enter that information, and with good reason: They have their finger on the pulse of the job shop. But the longer the gap between action and data entry, the more of a guessing game it becomes. Most of us can’t remember what we had for lunch, let alone the reason for downtime six hours earlier.

Managers and owners need to know their uptime, downtime, estimated run hours, actual run hours, machine hours versus run hours, and a host of other essential data.

The problem? Inaccurate data is the opposite of manufacturing intelligence. In addition, the entire process creates additional work and stress for your busy operators. They have more important tasks to focus on—such as work that delivers value instead of creating distractions.

When your plant constantly struggles to keep operators, it could be because employees feel a lack of control over their performance.

Stamping manufacturers must be able to access real-time, accurate data. Operators need to be able to understand actual performance and adjust accordingly. Operators also need to be able to send real-time, accurate data in full context right to your plant’s ERP system. They want to share what is happening and drive change. The days of clipboards, remembering every detail until the end of the shift, and having to walk through the entire shop floor to enter data into a single ERP input terminal are gone.

When front-line personnel can capture data quickly, the plant is able to take advantage of an operator’s skills, abilities, experience, and insight for more important work than manual data entry.

5. How do we use the data we collect?

In a recent PTC survey, 74% of manufacturing leaders said that leveraging their data more effectively would help them better address disruption in their business. That number illustrates just how broken the data collection process is in the majority of job shops. That inability to access and use data within departments and across an entire enterprise creates a significant challenge for manufacturers.

Supervisors and operators know the data they need is there. They just can’t get to it.

An inability to leverage data across the entire business means decision-making on the shop floor is hampered, bids written by managers are inaccurate, utilization rates decline, and profitability goes right out the window.

Manual data collection is no longer good enough. Manufacturers need access to real-time data, but they need more than that. They need to see that data in a common format, with context that gives it meaning. They need to see the big picture but also focus on elements of the whole. And they need to be able to share that information across their entire job shop.

When the entire business is operating off a single source of information, the team can work toward a common goal and the impact is measurable—sometimes in a matter of weeks.

Stamping manufacturers need solutions, and solutions require asking the right questions. If your job shop starts by answering these five important questions, it can hit the ground running in 2022—and beyond.

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