There are multiple reasons a company will implement a production reporting system. Some of the main reasons companies use this reporting software is to allow them to run more smoothly with less cost, waste and greater throughput of the manufacturing process. Production reporting systems offer a variety of agile solutions for today’s manufactures. It is imperative to have a software system which has the ability change with the needs of the manufacture.

Production reporting includes many different applications. These applications can include efficiency reporting, raw materials tracking, job tracking, job costing, scheduling, defect tracking, quality control, downtime reporting and scrap reporting. An example of a more skilled production reporting application is Advanced Planning.

Many of the advanced planning systems (APS) available are incorporated with artificial intelligence (AI). AI is intended to optimize a schedule from pre-defined constraints set by the user. Some of these constraints may include changeover, promised delivery dates for customers, labor load leveling, overtime reduction, raw materials availability and inventory.

Another expert production reporting system is Material Requirements Planning. Generally MRP software connects raw materials inventory, purchasing module, production schedule and sales forecast together to forecast any future raw materials requirements. Often times this system is integrated with purchasing to automatically produce purchase orders.

A more recent reporting application is closed loop production software. With closed loop the software retrieves the best historical runs of a product/work center combination. These runs, sometimes known as “best runs” are gathered from shop floor reporting systems that utilize configurable filters. Once these runs have been separated the software brings back the corresponding production and process settings that allowed the runs to be possible. Each of this production reporting applications allow for the manufactures to remove the specific information needed from the factory floor to optimize production.