Introduction

In most Manufacturing companies, engineers or project managers schedule jobs to use a certain number of man hours and machine hours to complete different phases of the job or manufacturing run.  There are times when this schedule is disrupted either by employee error or machine breakdown.  This disruption of the schedule needs to be tracked in order to adjust schedules and explain excess costs.

Issue

Here are some screen shots of a Non-Conformance Report Program (NCR) written for one of our clients.  The client is using Visual Manufacturing (VMFG) as their ERP System. VMFG schedules jobs based on lead times, capacity of manhours and machine hours, material availability and much more.  It tracks the schedule using a barcode system located on the manufacturing floor.  When an employee clocks in and out of a job, VMFG calculates the time of both the employee and the machine and can calculate the percentage of the job completed.  If there is a problem during one of the operations, extra time for both employee and machine may be clocked.  This information needed to be tracked to explain the increase in cost for the job.  With their new NCR program, the supervisors can indicate there was a problem and why it happened.

Figure 1  Initiation Screen – This is where the person in the shop enters the issue.  Once entered emails are automatically sent to the project manager and the supervisor.

Figure 2 – This is the screen that the supervisors and project managers use to enter additional information about how the issue should be and was resolved.  They can send this information to the customer, the inspection department and also sign off on their section as well as print off the actual report to accompany resolution drawings if necessary.

Figure 3 – Non-conformance Report – This report can be printed and filed with resolution drawings for future reference.

A more formal version of the NCR can be printed to be sent to the customer to let them know what has happened and what was done to resolve the problem.  This version doesn’t include any information such as employees, costs, etc.

Figure 4 – Customer NCR Report.

Conclusion

Even though we have used this program for manufacturing non-conformities, it could also be used in other form of reporting such as customer support calls, warranty work and more.

This is just one example of how we can integrate an out-of-the-box solution such as Visual Manufacturing (VMFG) with MS Access database to create a usable solution to an outstanding reporting issue for a company.