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 firms 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, it's 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 tracking and scheduling duties within the company.

A prime requirement for job 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.

Contract manufacturing is a 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 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  tools and the associated costs means that most of the infrastructure to support 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, it's important to evaluate the following functions to meet the company's unique requirements:

Recent Updates to Job Shop Manufacturing Software

Several vendors recently updated their job and machine shop management software. These updates focus on increasing mobile access to system data, improving financial reporting capabilities and enabling better machine productivity monitoring. These three vendors made recent updates to their job shop system:

• E2 Shop System - Shoptech recently expanded E2 Shop System functionality to work on the iPad and other tablet platforms. The app, called E2 Mobile Dashboard, gives managers and employees access to their machine shop job tracking software to monitor things like job profitability and sales performance. For instance, the Mobile Dashboard allows users to track profit margins either per job or over a given timeframe. In addition to allowing users to tracking profitability, E2’s Mobile Dashboard also provides data on quotes submitted--and the percentage of quotes that have been won--to help monitor the quoting process.
• ECi M1 - ECi Software recently announced a partnership with Global Software to enhance the financial reporting tool in their job shop schedule software. The announcement of their partnership coincided with the release of ECi M1 Advanced Financial Reporting. ECi’s Advanced Financial Reporting tools helps companies draw information such as general ledger, accounts payable, time and attendance information and more into an Excel spreadsheet by using Spreadsheet Server. This functionality simplifies data extraction from the ERP system and is useful for users that are more comfortable generating balance sheets and other statements in Excel.
• Casco ShopVue - Casco updated their system with the release of ShopVue 7.1.2, which features improved machine monitoring capabilities. Among the new machine monitoring functionality in ShopVue 7.1.2 is enhanced machine cycle counting and quantity counter readings to better track machine output. Casco also refined their machine shop scheduling software to provide better graphical shop floor scheduling. In the new version of ShopVue, shop floor managers have the ability to prioritize fabrication shop scheduling and graphically assign workers to their respective machines.