One Screen for the Entire Factory Floor

One Screen for the Entire Factory Floor

How a concrete products manufacturer moved production entry from the back office to the shop floor.

Introduction

The company manufactures concrete products across eight product families — interlocking pavers, shot-blasted pavers, wet-press kerbs, compound wall panels, drain channels, drain covers, fencing posts and lego blocks.

Production runs across several machines and working areas every day.

The company already used an ERP for production. On paper it worked. In practice, recording a single day of production had become one of the slowest and most error-prone jobs in the business — and the people who knew what actually happened on the floor were not the people entering it.

Problem Statement

1. Double handling of every production record. Production was written on paper by the shop-floor supervisor, carried to the office, and re-typed into the ERP by an office user. Every number passed through a translation step, and every translation step loses accuracy.

2. One day of production meant many separate entries. A single run is not one transaction in an ERP. Raw material has to be consumed, finished goods produced, then material moved from moulding to curing, and from curing to the storage racks. Each stage was a separate form.

3. Every entry needed technical knowledge. Each form asked for the correct source warehouse, destination warehouse, batch and unit of measure. A production supervisor should not have to know what a material transfer is.

4. Errors were invisible, not obvious. An entry made from the wrong warehouse does not fail. It saves successfully and quietly corrupts stock and costing for months, until someone notices a negative balance.

5. The floor never saw its own numbers. Because entry lagged a day or more behind reality, an unusual damage figure or consumption figure was discovered in a monthly report — long after anyone could act on it.

Solution Implemented

a. A dedicated production screen, not another form. Thirvusoft built a purpose-designed Manufacturing page inside the ERP, built as a proper application rather than a standard data-entry form. It shows the day's production jobs on the left, filterable by date, item, machine or status. Selecting a job opens it in place.

b. One job, one record, multiple items. If a job covers four different items, the screen shows one tab per item. Each tab holds everything about that item's run in a single view — the BOM and its raw materials, bin-wise consumption, labour hours and headcount, operators, damaged quantity, and every measurement that particular product family tracks.

c. Live calculation while the user types. Totals, production square feet and cost per unit recalculate on screen as data is entered. An unusual number gets questioned on the day it happened instead of being discovered a month later.

d. Bulk upload for raw material consumption. Consumption data comes off the mixer's own printout, often dozens of lines. Rather than force manual entry, the screen provides a downloadable template and accepts the data as an Excel or CSV upload, then splits it bin-wise and averages it automatically.

e. Stock entries generated by the system. Each production stage has a button. The system builds the correct stock entry — right warehouses, right batches, right units — and shows a preview before anything is committed. The supervisor confirms what happened; the software works out what that implies.

Outcomes & Benefits

✓ Production is now recorded by the supervisor who witnessed it, on the day it happened.

✓ A full day of production is entered on one screen instead of a chain of separate forms.

✓ No technical knowledge of warehouses, batches or transfer types is required to record production.

✓ Raw material consumption is uploaded in one step instead of keyed line by line.

✓ Cost per square foot is visible while the job is still open, so problems surface immediately.

✓ Stock entries are still created in full for accounting and audit — they are simply no longer a person's job to remember.

✓ The back office stopped re-typing production data entirely.