When we sit to plan, many of us think we need all the features, but with our experience, we have seen that more than 70% of the features are hardly used. So, the first step is to evaluate what features your team actually needs. We created an exhaustive list of features that constitute manufacturing software so that you can prioritize what you need.
Read on for the features checklist, but if you also want an exhaustive list of integrations to prioritize in manufacturing software, you can go here.
To help you choose the right software, we also prepared a blog about the top 7 manufacturing ERP software. You can find the blog here.
What is Manufacturing Software?
Manufacturing software, also known as Manufacturing ERP software, solves your automation requirements for manufacturing operations into a single software on the device of the shop floor team.
How to use the Feature Checklist?
You need to prioritize features such as P1, P2, and P3. This way you know what features you need, what are good to have, and what you don’t want for your team today. The definition is as follows,
P1: High Priority
P2: Low Priority
P3: Not needed
Feature Checklist for Manufacturing Software
1. Scheduling
You can schedule tasks for workers and machines and set the task dependencies, and priorities, add comments, documents, and photos for better communication.
Priority: [____]
2. Production Planning
You can prioritize production based on raw material, machines, and employee availability. You can plan and get visibility through the process of start to finish the production.
Priority: [____]
3. Barcode Scanning
You can scan inventory through a barcode scanner that helps in quickly adding, updating, and searching complex inventory, reducing manual errors, and increasing the accuracy of your stock data.
Priority: [____]
4. Inventory Management
You can always keep track of inward and outward stocks and parts using different criteria like serial number, barcode, expiration date, etc to avoid understocking and overstocking.
Priority: [____]
5. Low Stock Alerts
Set up minimum stock values to get alerts when the stock levels are below that value and generate purchase orders to keep your business moving and avoid stock-outs.
Priority: [____]
6. Batch & Expiry Tracking
You can track and trace your products from beginning to end across your inventory system and keep an eye on the expiry dates to act quickly.
Priority: [____]
7. Serial Tracking
You can easily track any product with a unique serial number from your inventory system. It gives you more visibility of where your products are and also eliminates manual cross-referencing of products.
Priority: [____]
8. Order Management
You can manage all the orders and customers in one place. This will help you to track control of your sales. Assign status like saved, confirm, in process, and fulfilled for easy tracking.
Priority: [____]
9. Multi-Channel Order Management
You can centralize all your orders coming from different sales channels like eCommerce, B2B, etc in one place.
Priority: [____]
10. Partial Order Fulfillment
You can easily manage partial order fulfillment by shipping only the stocks that are available and shipping the rest of the stocks in another shipment.
Priority: [____]
11. Automated Backordering Process
Keep track of what needs to be ordered to fulfill sales orders. You can automate the purchase orders for out-of-stock items by adding default supplier details and quantity.
Priority: [____]
12. Purchase Order Management
You can easily restock and reorder inventory, avoid duplicate orders, track orders and bulk purchases to save time, and get detailed information on each purchase order.
Priority: [____]
13. Partial Purchase Order Fulfillment
When your vendor has supplied a partial order to you, the purchase order will be opened until your complete order is not fulfilled.
Priority: [____]
14. Vendor Bills
You can create bills from your purchase orders that can be automatically sent to your integrated accounting software. You can also automate the process by saving the supplier details and prices for the next time.
Priority: [____]
15. Vendor Management
You can manage all your vendor information like contact details, pricing, lead time, etc in one place. And compare prices from different vendors, and bulk import suppliers, and create custom documents for vendors.
Priority: [____]
16. Work Orders
Manage each step in the production and inventory management process, identify the bottlenecks, and improve workflows by setting priorities and avoiding overload to improve productivity.
Priority: [____]
17. Bill of Materials (BOM)
You can create a Bill of materials to easily manage your recipes. It gives you detailed information about raw materials, components, and instructions that smoothens the manufacturing process.
Priority: [____]
18. Multi-level Bill of Materials
You can build a Bill of Materials with multiple stages, sub-assemblies, complex units of measure, and multiple finished goods. It helps to easily update quantities and parts, create detailed instructions and avoid production delays.
Priority: [____]
19. Warehouse Management
You can easily manage and track stocks across multiple locations and warehouses from one centralized location. You can fulfill and receive orders into a specific warehouse, restrict access to specific warehouses for employees, and generate warehouse location reports.
Priority: [____]
20. Quality Checks
Create quality checklists to check quality parameters after the product is made. Track materials wasted and flaws in processes and generate real-time quality reports.
Priority: [____]
21. Machine Management and Maintenance
You can measure Overall Equipment Effectiveness(OEE) to know how the machine operations are going on, and which ones are down or need maintenance. You can also schedule machine maintenance to reduce downtime and optimize production.
Priority: [____]
22. Customer Management
You can get a consolidated view of all customer records in a single database, so every member of your team has a 360-degree view of all customer activities and records, and management has real-time insight into performance.
Priority: [____]
23. Customer Pricing & Discounts
If you have specific product prices for different customers, you can apply different discounts by selecting customer details, product details, and discount types.
Priority: [____]
24. Reports and Analytics
You can get real insights into the processes and data through customizable dashboards and reports. It can help improve your decision-making and analysis trends.
Priority: [____]
25. Sales Quotes
You can generate customizable quotes for customers with live-inventory data, and customer details and can clone the quotes for repeated customers.
Priority: [____]
26. Time and Attendance Tracking
You can keep track of your workers’ time, breaks, and working hours, on what machines they are working on and export that data to payroll software.
Priority: [____]
27. Shop Floor Control and WIP Tracking
You can automatically capture daily activities on your shop floor. View real-time status of the job work, the location of every workstation, employee assignments, etc.
Priority: [____]
28. Mobile-Friendly
Your shop floor teams can access the software through mobile phones. They can add and update data, status, etc while working on shop floors.
Priority: [____]
29. Notifications and Alerts
You can notify employees by sending automated emails/SMS when certain events happen like a task is assigned, canceled, or updated.
Priority: [____]
30. Payments
You can improve your cash flow with hassle-free payments. An automated invoice is sent to the customer and makes them pay digitally.
Priority: [____]
31. Email Marketing
Automatically sync customers’ details and create custom email designs through drag-and-drop options to run email campaigns.
Priority: [____]
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This way you can understand what features you need before choosing the right Manufacturing Software for your team. But most Manufacturing Software is all-in-one software that comes with many features, some of them are undesired and will hamper the team’s adoption.
So instead, we recommend using a no-code tool like Utilize to build your own app with just the features you need.
Here is a sample app built for a manufacturing team with production workflow processes.
Get started with Utilize now!
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