Shop Floor Control Using a Computer Aided System

The process of shop floor control is an important and necessary task that has to be performed by managers in every organization. The work presented in this paper has been carried with an on-line interaction with the industry that has been engaged in the manufacture of various hydraulic components. It has been observed that conventionally all the activities related to shop floor control are being executed manually. Considering the problems associated with the manual control and large number of variables/parameters and their interdependency, a need has been felt to develop a computer-aided system, which would simplify the process of shop floor control. The work has been aimed to generate an integrated process-planning chart, to design a systematic database, to generate job card and inspection report with the help of inputs from process plan and to generate other useful outputs such as status report, performance report etc. It is possible to have online real-time status. Scope of present work can be extended for the calculations of the cost for individual operations and subsequently cost of the entire project. The entire system has been developed using simple and commonly available software tools. It has been observed and proved that, the shop floor could derive a great advantage from the present system.