NetSuite Manufacturing Routing Visibility
When deciding to implement NetSuite’s Manufacturing Routing feature, companies often do it with the intent to gain more visibility and control over their manufacturing processes. In specific, companies seek to understand and better control the following key areas:
- The cost to manufacture a specific product.
- The time involved to manufacture said product.
- The steps to manufacture said product.
- The resources involved in manufacturing said product.
- The scheduling of said resources, both human and machine.
NetSuite Manufacturing Operation Tasks
Gaining visibility and control into these key areas is important to companies who seek to stay competitive in an ever increasingly automated landscape where the ability to price products competitively and strategically can make or break a company. NetSuite’s Manufacturing Routing feature adds value by providing organizations with the systemic framework to capture this important data and gain control over production related costing. With that said, I would like to provide an overview of one of the key records used by the system and discuss how it can add value to your manufacturing operation.
Manufacturing Operation Tasks
A typical work order configured to use the manufacturing routing feature will have a series of records that define the production steps involved in building a product. From this Manufacturing Routing record, manufacturing operation tasks corresponding to the product’s manufacturing routing record will be auto generated by the system during work order creation. These manufacturing operation task records provide valuable insight into production data including:
- The estimated hours to complete the given production quantity (for this operation).
- The actual hours elapsed on this operation.
- The hours remaining on this operation.
- The quantity completed on this operation.
- The Run Rate (the minutes it takes to complete a unit on this operation).
- The scheduled Start Date and End Date.
NetSuite Manufacturing KPIs and Searches
Additional data including the cost template being used, the number of labor resources and machine resources, and predecessor information can also be found on this record. While this record can be used to help production managers plan and track operations day-to-day, I believe where it really shines is in its reporting capabilities. The record, like most in NetSuite, can be queried through saved search to build reports and metrics to answer questions such as:
- Operational Efficiency
- How efficient are we based on the planned standard?
- Throughput Per Hour
- How fast are we producing units based on actual hours?
- Setup Time Variance
- Are there delays or inefficiencies in setup prior to production?
- Operation Completion %
- What is the progress of this operation?
- Work Order Progress %
- What is the progress of this work order?
Figure 1 A typical manufacturing operation task record shows insights which can be transformed into meaningful business metrics.
NetSuite Manufacturing Analytics Insights
By querying the data provided by this manufacturing task record to create these metrics, companies can gain the insight needed to control and fine tune their production. While the examples I have provided here are primarily operational in nature, financial metrics can also be queried using these saved searches and records.