One mistake — one distraction, one contamination, or one miscalculation – may have a significant impact in your organization. You never want to be the topic of a recall headline, lose money because manufacturing was abruptly stopped, or endanger consumers’ health. However, one error could ruin your reputation, sales, and, eventually, your bottom line.
In this market, batch and process manufacturers, in particular, cannot afford to make mistakes. The “cost of being wrong” can be reduced with the proper systems in place. Hyper-Tight Process Control™ from Deacom ERP, allows manufacturers to enforce scalable and repeatable processes that cannot be bypassed by employees. It gives organizations better visibility and control by incorporating quality checkpoints that guarantee specifications and compliance criteria are satisfied consistently – even if the entire process must be halted in the middle of production.
Hyper-Tight Process Control™ elevates typical process controls by delivering a comprehensive strategy that eliminates risk concerns. It requires supply chain planning, manufacturing operations, warehouse management, and quality control (QC) activities to be included as part of the overall ERP system. This provides complete management of operations, from receiving to shipping and document generation, all while being intelligent enough to halt the process at any time.
The Deacom Warehouse Management System (WMS) is one area of the platform where this level of checks and balances is strictly enforced and Hyper-Tight Process Control™ can be seen in action.
Picking Raw Materials for a Production Job
As demonstrated in the video below, while operators within a manufacturing facility are scanning and assigning raw materials to a production job, the Deacom WMS is ensuring that the lots being scanned will meet the production requirements.
When the operator scans a production pick ticket, the WMS is identifying the raw material requirements by lot and the quantities that are required. Subsequently, when the operator scans the lot label that was generated and assigned at the time of receiving, the system ensures that what the operator is scanning meets the requirements based on that production job.
If the operator scans something that doesn’t meet that requirement, the Deacom WMS is going to stop that operator from moving forward, providing Hyper-Tight Process Control™. An example of this might be if materials that are still in a QC hold have not been released to production, but an operator attempts to scan them anyway.
As the operator scans the materials that are required for that production job it alerts the operator that they have met those requirements and can move forward in the process.
Shipping Finished Goods
This is a similar process when we talk about it from the perspective of shipping finished goods out.
When the operator is scanning the materials relating to a sales order and customer requirements, the Deacom WMS will make sure that the finished goods being scanned to that specific sales order, based on the pick ticket, comply with the requirements.
Prior to this during production, labels with GS1-128 barcodes were generated throughout the process. These same barcodes can be used in receiving, job issuing, job finishing, and sales reserving. All the information that the Deacom WMS collects in a scan is automatically placed into the appropriate fields within the software. They can contain data such as best before dates, batch numbers, quantities, and weights.
If the operator attempts to scan something that doesn’t meet the requirements defined in the system, the WMS is going to stop them. An example of this might be that the lot they scan is outside of the quality specification for that customer and that product.
Once they scan the correct materials meeting the requirements of the correct lots and quantities, the WMS is going to allow them to move forward.
The system is then able to provide communication to your customers with an advanced shipment notification that includes information that the correct lots, the correct products, and the correct quantities were picked.
Watch Hyper-Tight Process Control™ in Action
In the following video, Amanda Goodman, Lead Product Consultant for Deacom, demonstrates exactly how the warehouse management functionality helps manufacturers achieve Hyper-Tight Process Control™ by ensuring the right materials are always being picked for production jobs or shipments.
