What is WIP Inventory Manager?
The WIP Inventory Manager is a powerful tool designed to track material flow from the store to finished goods for work-in-process (WIP) parts on the shop floor. Beyond tracking, it enables management of rejections, rework, and scrap materials, providing comprehensive oversight of all production stages. Equipped with role-based permissions, the application supports secure access and process-specific functionalities for different users. Additionally, it offers WIP dashboards and charts that provide real-time visibility into WIP inventory, helping teams monitor and optimize production efficiency at any given moment.
WIP Process Master Information
In manufacturing, each company’s production process, raw materials, parts, and components are unique. Even within the same organization, each part may follow a distinct sequence of processes to become a finished product. WIP management tools, especially in digitally transformed environments, are designed to capture and store all these configurations within the application’s master data.
The WIP Manager streamlines this by allowing operators to select predefined raw materials, parts, and processes, significantly reducing data entry requirements on the shop floor. This setup not only enhances efficiency but also minimizes the training needed for shop floor teams, making it easier for them to manage WIP data accurately and consistently.
Process WIP Inventory
For each production process, the target must be set for the amount of WIP required. It must be agreeable to undergo smooth production work flow providing enough time to resolve production issues before WIP shortages occur. Also, the presence of unnecessary WIP Inventory results in unreliable supply chain, requirement of excessive manual work finally resulting in unnecessary delay and increased WIP Costs. To avoid all these hurdles and pursue efficient WIP movement of stocks, WIP manager will allow production managers to only pull inventory / materials when needed without the need for much Inventory. The application will help understand the process at each level to exactly know which process needs material to move forward. It facilitates quick & easy configuration WIP Inventory Limits by process and part and enable tracking of material movement at each process steps.
Rejection, Rework & Scrap
No shop floor can create all the parts as good one in the first go. However, some of the parts that are identified as defective or out of specification as per the quality provided by the customer can be reworked and made as per the requirement. it is crucial to track the defective parts along with the possibility of rework and making it perfect. So the categorization of the rejected parts into scrap and the rework is the first step towards improving the quality outcome of the work order. WIP manager provides options for handling and tracking rework and scrap.
- Rejection – refers to defectives which do not meet with dimensional or quality standards but can be reworked for rectification of defects.
- Rework - refers to the process in which the parts that were identified as defective and gets transformed into shippable quality product.
- Scrap – refers discarded parts that have no values. And such materials can not be reworked to create shippable parts.
Operators can easily deal with material losses by moving the defective items either to the rejection or to the scrap.
Zero Data Manipulation & Minimal Manual Entry
Factory shop floors today use paper and excel to manage the inventory movement. These tools can always be manipulated at any point of time. The WIP manager will streamline data entry across the shop floor by minimizing the data entry. Most of the master data like parts, process and the relation to parts, process order, users, and roles in the system. The material count is added at the start of the process (store). However, all the other material movement was in relation to the initial material count added.
The operators or floor supervisors will have only one option to move the materials they have in their department. No manipulation of data can be done at any process in the application. In addition to removing the paper from the shop floor, the WIP Manager will have 90% of of the options as selection and only 10% data entry with only the count entered.
WIP Inventory History
In the Industry 4.0 era, Department heads and Factory leaders need tracking of data backwards to understand the efficiency of their shop floor. WIP Manager preservers the complete history of the WIP Movement across individual process and parts. For the detailed analysis, these data can be filtered and analyzed.
WIP Dashboard - Reports & Charts
A detailed report dashboard of production, WIP Trend and the Rejection and scrap is shown against the time. The WIP report can be filtered by process, parts, date, etc., A more detailed view of the report is shown in the Manufacturing execution system.
- Production Report - The movement of the WIP represents the completion of the particular operation equivalent to the production of the part. The production against the date is shown in the dashboard
- WIP Change Trend - WIP fluctuation report will show the fluctuation in the material in the WIP Inventory. The inventory change is plotted against the date.
- Rejection & Scrap - Rejection, handing of the rejection to rework, helps in reducing the wastage of raw materials and increasing productivity. The tracking of rejection by date against parts, process, will help identify and reduce rejection.
Operators can easily deal with material losses by moving the defective items either to the rejection or to the scrap.
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