MORE Manufacturing: Bringing Visibility

Drew Watters, Director

The evolving demography of the modern day manufacturing industry has lead to significant advancements in the ERP space. An efficient ERP system extends the focal area of a manufacturing unit to pry beyond cost reduction, waste reduction, and inventory control and accommodates other intricate aspects such as accurately identifying error patterns within the supply chain and containing them effectively through advanced visualization of data. However, a large number of contemporary ERP software packages today tend to fall short of addressing these issues due to the inflexibility of the solutions to align with all the customer requirements and inadequate supply chain visibility. This is where More Manufacturing establishes its eminence with its best-of-breed, specialist manufacturing sector production management, and planning tools. The company’s proprietary MoreMX software is specifically designed with a sole focus to address intricate complexities of manufacturing as it allows managers to see and understand their production workload in real time. The software enables the client in identifying and mitigating errors, surprises and anomalies while efficiently handling their Cost Accounting.

Drew Watters, Director of MORE Manufacturing says, “The key to a factory’s profitability and customer satisfaction is to deliver the product on time and deliver it right. The primary focus of the MoreMX software is to help our clients achieve 100 percent DIFOTIS.” More Manufacturing adopted gaming UX technology as an innovative edge for providing efficient presentation and interaction of the collected data. As an efficient closed-loop ERP system, MoreMX provides visibility of the product design specifications to all its stakeholders throughout the manufacturing process to solicit their improvement suggestions and observations and enables them to monitor and control quality and track any material substitutions.

The software focuses exclusively on the best-practices of operations management. The software provides practical configuration tools for defining the Finite Capacity constraints of all the available resources in the plant including their variable work hour patterns. This information is then used by the software to run a real time simulation to calculate all the work orders and constraints dynamically which is later displayed to all the users with highlighted constraints. Running this data through MoreMX, the client can perform ‘what-if’ simulations and ‘drag & drop’ jobs to different positions to see immediate effects to the entire project plan with a high-degree of accuracy.

We Support Enhanced Human Interaction And Management Of The Plan. ie. Decision Support Rather Than 'Machine Override

These insights enable the manufacturing units to identify the lagging points of the existing processing model and take proactive steps to obliterate the same. The interactive visual display of all activities in the plant is projected as a forward schedule on a finite capacity basis. This enables close management of all confirmed orders, coordination of raw materials, labor and tools at the right place and time, and helps to monitor on-schedule completion of Due dates. With a ‘drag and drop’ user interface, the software is intuitive and simple to use. The firm also renders an ‘adaptable calendar management screen’ that pictures the unplanned absences and abets in planning workforce more prominently.

Amidst growing demand, manufacturing units often find it arduous to forecast a realistic plant schedule in the plant. To address this, MORE Manufacturing has introduced a module called ‘Shopfloor Feedback’ that provides complete visibility of work tasks through electronic access that monitors the change in the spectrum of workflow and performs quality tests in real time. The solution can be deployed either on PC, iPad, Android device or on the machine interface to complete production quantity feedback loop. Among other features of the module, real-time bar-coding and scanning capability help the unit with accurate in-line processing for traceability/IoT tracking.

Illustrating the firm’s unique approach towards its customers, Watters iterates the case of one of the clients that needed an upgrade to notch up their existing legacy system which was stuck with poor visibility of order loadings and ineffective scheduling affecting their on-time delivery performance and customer satisfaction. The manual process of the unit was increasing the TCO with missed DIFOT efforts. Despite inputting all their data into the ERP system, the client found it difficult to forecast loadings and get realistic delivery dates. More stepped in to assist the client in revamping their manual processes and provided them with real-time insights of all the constraints by highlighting the bottlenecks in their processes. The latter scaled up the unit to new heights in the efficiency graph as they enticed lower operating costs through elimination of reactive, urgent, and downtime costs. Notably, there were significant improvements in quality, fewer returns, and traceability owing to its reliable feedback loop of MORE Manufacturing. “We do not believe in ‘Fixed Time Scheduling’ which is often marketed as ‘The Optimization’; however its very definition excludes the process continuous improvement. We support enhanced human interaction and management of the plan. ie. Decision support rather than ‘machine override’.” adds Watters.

The company’s recent move to Cloud technology is expected to extend its reach to a global audience by 2018. The company further plans to reinforce its innovative stance in the business software UX development with its centralized training system modeled on gaming technology. This will help the company to measure user participation and unlock new feature levels, and status points as users gain experience.