What is Manufacturing Software?
Manufacturing Software help manufacturing organizations obtain, manage, and analyze production data across the operation to improve processes.
Using manufacturing software, organizations can pull data from multiple sources on inventory, materials, production, equipment, workstations, personnel, resource utilization, and other aspects of the process to reduce costs and increase productivity.
Manufacturing intelligence systems are primarily used by supervisors, production managers, and shop floor employees to monitor the production process, find task schedules, and the information they require to perform production necessities.
Manufacturing intelligence software can be used on its own or integrated with other manufacturing systems.
For example, manufacturing execution systems (MES) software requires shop floor data from supervisory control and data acquisition systems (SCADA). These control all equipment involved in the production process.
MES tools are also typically integrated in with enterprise resource planning (ERP) software to add in information on materials consumption, production output, inventory, record-keeping, data analysis, work-in-progress (WIP) reporting, and so on.
These software solutions commonly include:
- Enterprise asset management (EAM)
- Product lifecycle management (PLM)
- Supply chain management and planning (SCM)
- Manufacturing resource planning (MRP) software
- Enterprise resource planning (ERP) software
- Manufacturing execution systems (MES) software
- Enterprise quality management (QMS) software
- Supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) software
Manufacturing software features
For a product to merit inclusion in the manufacturing software category, it should:
- Help structure manufacturing and production related data
- Gather data from all systems involved in production
- Provide information to managers, supervisors, and employees to help them with task scheduling and other important information
- Analyze production data in real-time and track resource utilization of materials, inventory, and personnel on the floor
- Provide dashboard and data visualizations to track all aspects of production performance