Job Shop & Machine Shop Software

Job shop and machine shop specialties are limited-scale manufacturing, including prototyping and single unit production or “one offs.” Margins can be very thin, so successful job shops balance their time spent on manufacturing with time on maintaining inventory and fostering customer relationships. Job shop software is essentially an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system with a limited scope. In fact, job shop and machine shop software is often part of ERP if the shop is a small part of a larger organization. Broadly speaking, the system is used to automate many of the shop tracking and scheduling duties within a job shop.

A prime requirement for job shops and machine shops is manufacturing resource planning (MRP), the system that schedules the manufacturing of each customer’s order. Inventory and order entry are important and must be integrated with the MRP system, particularly with the pipeline management system. Job shops are relationship-based businesses. As such, owners should use customer relationship management (CRM) to track sales history and to market opportunities targeted at specific customers. Strictly speaking, payroll is standard. However, one of the resources tracked by MRP is worker time spent per work order. This allows job shop owners and managers to measure the profitability of each employee.

General ledger, accounts payable, and accounts receivable are standard. Most job shop manufacturing software is installed on premises. The computerization and networking of shop tools and the associated costs means that most of the infrastructure to support the job shop scheduling software is already in place, negating the hardware cost arguments for cloud-based installations.

Key Requirements for Job Shops & Machine Shops

In addition to core business functions, job shop and machine shop owners should evaluate the following functions to meet their unique requirements: