Furniture production tracking system

Task and problem

The company is engaged in the production of office, kitchen and other types furniture. The company has about 100 employees. As there are 24 different operations performed by employees, it has become difficult to follow the production process and know the stage at which a particular order is. The client encountered the following problems:

• There was no unified system where engineers, project managers and employees could store all order information, track data in real time, and eliminate the use of different Excel tables.
• Employees were provided with technical information in paper form and marked completed tasks on separate sheets, which later had to be manually be entered into a computer.
• Productivity and time spent on order / operation were not recorded.
• There was no possibility to analyze financial and profitability information at an individual order level.
• The contract with the client was generated manually.

Office 365 and Azure solutions

The storage of Client’s production process data has been transferred to the Microsoft Azure database. This ensures the highest level of data security and GDPR compliance. There is no longer any need to use separate Excel tables, as all engineers have access to the latest information. In addition, a file storage system was created using SharePoint, which facilitated document retrieval and made it possible to separate the technical information available to employees from commercial company documents available only to management.

Order management

After creating a database for order data management, it became easier  or the Client to store all order information in one place—customer data, assigned project managers, deadlines, terms of payment, and priorities.
Also, now everyone can see the stage of each order (design, submitted proposal, in production, etc.). In addition, Microsoft Flow technology provides the Client with a fully automated contract-generating process—with one-click, a contract is generated with the buyer’s details, payment terms, location, and other data. This avoids manual work and reduces the probability of error.

Mobile application for production

In order to eliminate the use of paper forms in the production process and to automate the tracking of time spent on each operation, a mobile application was created for the Client. Instead of writing the time spent on the drawing, the employees now select the operation from the list, choose who is working on the operation, and press the START button. When the operation is finished, they press the END button.

This made it possible to significantly speed up and more accurately track the production process. Also, the orders are sorted by priority and there is a possibility to view the attached drawings and other technical information directly on the tablet screen.

Real-time tracking of production process

The collected production data allows management to monitor the progress of each order and each operation in real time using a Power BI report—i.e., which operations are still pending, which are currently in progress and which ones have been completed.

Also, taking into account the coefficient of each operation, the progress completion percentage of each order is calculated.

This enabled the production manager to respond more quickly to changes, more accurately plan order completion times, and more efficiently allocate resources.

Financial analysis

The final place where all the collected data appears is the Financial Report.

Revenue is retrieved from the order information data, the price of materials from the supply table, and the spent time and labor costs—from the mobile application.

This allowed the Client to track the profitability of each order in real time without any additional tools and without waiting for the closing of monthly accounting data.

With the help of filters, the customer can also analyze the data by buyers, project managers and search for historical information by order number or date range.