Considering the current economy and the fact that a survey by the National Tooling & Machining Association showed that 48 percent of shops said in late 2009 that business is poor, the need to monitor shop operations as a way to improve productivity seems apparent.

The evolution of manufacturing environments saw steady advances through inventory control in the 1960s, material requirements planning (MRP) in the 1970s and MRP II in the 1980s, then enterprise resource planning (ERP) in the 1990s.

Material requirement planning, MRP II and enterprise resource planning all require a large amount of monitoring to be done in a shop.

As the logical supplement to material requirement planning and its successor, MRP II, enterprise resource planning allows data to be integrated. However, only about 10 percent of employees actually interact with enterprise resource planning, David Leichleitner, senior product expert for JobBoss, said. JobBoss (www.jobboss.com) provides a variety of manufacturing software packages, including enterprise resource planning software. Today, the company offers Extended ERP that extends enterprise resource planning across an entire organization.

As companies are required to maintain their competitive edge, and to respond to pricing pressures and to do more with less, it's increasingly important that their planning software do more also, Leichleitner said.

The JobBoss software operates on the principle of never entering data twice, he said.

For example: Its advanced scheduling module is designed to allow shops to replace whiteboards with an easy-to-use scheduling board. The computerized board gives the user the opportunity to do “what-if” scenarios by dragging-and-dropping items that have to be fit into a schedule and load leveling, while also allowing resources and hours to be changed on-the-fly.

The company calls that a “shop-at-a-glance” feature and it is designed to let users focus on key work centers and critical time frames.

The program's ShopBoss feature shows basic information about a job or work center, and helps users to spot problems or to manipulate a schedule while there is time to meet delivery dates. It also lets users drill into the details of a schedule by job, work center, job number, job or customer.

“Job shop scheduling will always be tough, but we're trying to make it easier,” said Leichleitner.

Separately, the E2 Shop System from Shoptech (www.shoptech.com) is designed as a singly software program that provides everything that a company needs to manage the shop. It has estimating and quoting, ordering, inventory and purchasing, scheduling, tracking, real time data collection, quality, performance analysis, and accounting features.

The company said its estimating and quoting system is designed to capture job specs and profitability from the start of the quote process to eliminate wasted time and headaches in the estimating and quoting process. The system is designed to enable users to set an estimating grid and pre-determined values such as burden, labor rate and quantity breaks. Those values can be changed as needed for special jobs or to accommodate shop conditions, and allows quoting to become as easy as pushing one button.

The E2 Shop System uses a built-in scheduling whiteboard to provide a snapshot of shop capabilities in seconds, and monitors capabilities. The company said that better tracking can be translated into better work flow for optimum productivity.

The software's performance analysis feature allows shops to measure the efficiency of employees and work centers to see where scrap is generated, which employees are productive, and which cost the shop money. The data can be used to put together an incentive program for employees based on performance, the company said.

MyWorkPlan (www.myworkplan.com) produces an enterprise resource planning software system with four modules:

• Estimator that calculates quotations based on CAD-data or information from the job and quotation database or Excel spreadsheets.

• Job Tracker that is designed to monitor the progress of jobs, and to create proof of delivery documents and invoices with a single mouse click.

• Scheduler that is designed to manage resources and capacities, find the appropriate time slot for production based on capacities and requested delivery dates.

• And Infomanager that is designed to keep all the information about the jobs in one place, including letters, e-mails, notes, dates and even CAD data, and uses an alarm to alert users to important dates and events.

The MyWorkPlan software is made by Sescoi USA (www.sescoi.com).

Global Shop Solutions (www.globalshopsolutions.com) has a One-System enterprise resource planning software package that is calls “One-System.”

The company said the software is designed to streamline manufacturing operations in a job shop, and that it provides inclusive, integrated, business functions such as estimating, quoting, order entry, shipping, invoicing, work order entry, scheduling, job tracking, costing, purchasing, inventory control, general ledger, accounts payable and receivable, payroll and financial statements, said the company.

The Global Shop technology is designed to allow other software packages such as Excel, Crystal Reports, ADP, SolidWorks, and AutoCad to be seamlessly incorporated with it. If a shop needs something beyond the standard applications, the company said its GS Global Application Builder feature allows nearly unlimited customization to be done to fit the shop's specific needs.