Information systems for effective company management

Events February 10, 2023 Blog

Information systems for effective management of companies.

In today's post I would like to say a few words about effective business management. I emphasize the word efficient, because the company can be managed even by looking around the workshop and issuing orders. The effectiveness will probably be lost there. It is clear that without accurate information at the right time it will not work. As someone said before, it's all about timing: Ininformation that comes too early, no one understands, information that comes late, no one cares ……. I borrowed this quote because I am often confronted with the fact that a company uses an information system, from which it somehow fulfills excel tables, with the help of which he plans and manages production. Which means that the data is already out of date the moment it left the information system. Therefore, we should ask ourselves 3 basic questions:

Do we need an information system?

Yes, everyone who produces anything needs an information system. The days of Excel workbooks are gone forever, as well as storing documentation in shared folders.

Which information system to choose?

The question is not at all simple and it certainly cannot be said that if we buy the most expensive one, we cannot spoil anything. First of all, it depends on the company's processes and its size. A corporation with many users has different requirements and another business that needs to be managed by 1 people. On the other hand, it is also necessary to take into account that the company will grow and the system must therefore be able to handle new challenges.

What are the information system requirements?

A comprehensive system should include the following basic elements:

Documentation and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM)

Valid documentation is the basis of any production. It must be possible to approve the documentation at different levels, perform change management and display it only to those to whom it is intended. This also implies a requirement for secure storage, which in no case is a shared folder on the disk. If the company uses CAD systems, the system should handle integration to this system.

This applies not only to the attributes of parts, but also to the creation and maintenance of BOMs.

Production management and logistics

The follow-up element is the ERP system, ideally working with the same data as PLM, by which I mean the shared databases of both systems, not data transfers between them.

The goal of ERP is to deliver the required quantity of an item at the agreed price, date and quality.

So we need tools for managing technological and custom BOMs, variant technological procedures. Furthermore, material and capacity planning, price variants for purchase, quality control support (both from the point of view of measurement protocols and also from the point of view of calibration of meters).

The system must be able to handle different types of production, because, for example, the company operates both a press shop and a tool shop, where there are completely different approaches to production management. Last but not least, it is necessary to monitor costs and this cannot be ensured other than by feedback from the factory, ideally using barcodes, which are easy to use and virtually eliminate the possibility of incorrect input.

This is also related to product traceability, in industries such as the automotive, aerospace and food industries it is practically mandatory. This is only a very brief overview of the basic functionality, but even from this it is clear that no accounting program will provide this, even with a superstructure for production.

Finance

The ideal situation is, of course, if the system also includes a finance module, including accounting. On the other hand integration with the accounting program it also has its advantages. These programs are usually in the company for a long time, so accountants are used to them and do not need to learn anything new, there is no need to migrate accounting data, etc. With a well-executed integration, other users of the information system will not even recognize where they get their data from.