When it comes to tracking your products from point of origin to delivery, no amount of visibility is too much.

The digital age puts a novel set of tools at your disposal. Production tracking software allows your organization to measure, analyze, and adjust the manufacturing process in real-time, creating unprecedented visibility into granular-level performance. This means you can monitor each production step as it happens and use analytics generated by artificial intelligence (AI) to improve the production process. 

Before the general availability of modern digital tools, managing the supply chain has long been a wrestle with spread sheets, paper documents, emails and phone calls. This mix of media offers a fraction of digital visibility. After all, even the most highly customized Excel spreadsheet still requires manual data entry.

Dr Hanson Li, Director of Quality Assurance and Traceability Program at Value Source Group, pointed out in an Inspectorio webinar that “[Traditional tracking] has a few shortfalls … such as when a supervisor forgets to update the board, updates the board with the wrong numbers, or an error is made due to messy handwriting. Handwriting may be difficult to read across the shop floor, making its visibility less than ideal.”

As the industry evolves away from such tools, it is essential you understand the capabilities now available to you through production tracking software.

The factors multiplying your supply chain risk:

• Disorganization: missed deadlines and penalties, loss of brand trust from consumers, and late shipment costs.
• Siloed communication: lack of accountability, inability to locate the causes of late shipments, and difficulty measuring continuous improvement in factories.
• Lack of historical performance data: impairs business decisions and prevents vendors from reacting to risks.
• Poor quality control: allows defects in semi-finished products to pass undetected to the finished products, increasing costs and delays.
• Poor understanding of production capacity: inability to deliver orders on time — this leads to inventory distortion, which costs brands and retailers a staggering $1.75 trillion each year.
• Reliance on third-party audits: delays the production process.

Why you must shift to digitized production tracking

COVID-19 permanently altered the global supply chain. When suddenly faced with staggered lockdowns, factories went offline one by one. Brands and retailers were unable to produce and ship products, or see what was happening on the factory floor. How could they remedy the problem?

The result was a shift toward digital production tracking. According to PWC, more than one in three supply chain leaders are planning sweeping changes to their supply chain, using “automation to improve the speed and accuracy of decision-making.”

Disruptions on the scale of the COVID-19 pandemic could become more frequent as time goes on. In the face of increasing risk, the global supply chain has no choice but to become more resilient — and digital production tracking represents the most capable solution.

Tracking software transforms production management

Ensure your goods ship out on time with full visibility of every step in production. It’s the only way you’ll be able to respond to important issues as they arise, instead of fixing them after the damage is done.

Digital production tracking allows stakeholders to view the status of orders in real time. In practice, this means you’ll know as soon as a problem occurs and be able to work together on a solution

A tracking system analyses data and provides the tools for quick and effective collaboration. With a high degree of production planning execution, you can track the entire process of a work order, reduce the mixing of defective products, and quickly trace the source of quality issues.

Six essential production tracking features:

• Full traceability
• Production picking
• Batch management
• Replenishment and return
• Flexible scheduling and production
• Automatic matching of materials and ingredients

Digital tracking collect process data, standardizes information, and serves as an ongoing and ever-deepening source of insights. According to McKinsey, new systems can generate data that would otherwise require considerable manual effort to obtain, “freeing up about 15 percent of back-office capacity and enabling better, more timely decision-making.”

Empower your production environment

Inspectorio Tracking meets the need of global companies in a complex and ever-changing production environment.

1.   Achieve full visibility

Visibility comes in the form of both real-time data from the production floor and historical production tracking data. This means every piece of data collected will continue to provide context for future analytics, helping you identify problems and prevent delays. 

2.   Easily configure data

An efficient production tracking system allows manufacturers to easily adjust what data is collected and when. Manufacturers use production tracking data to improve their existing processes, so the tracking system itself must be adaptable. 

Inspectorio Tracking easily integrates with existing systems including ERP, MES, and communication systems, as well as the Inspectorio's quality control and compliance functions. 

3.   Leverage powerful automation

Standardizing production tracking processes will decrease manual work. It allows you to easily view defect rates, production targets and on-time shipments, generated autonomously using real-time updates. 

4. Drive results with detailed analytics

Access to accurate data on production helps vendors quickly analyze and evaluate factory performance. Using AI-generated insights, you can identify the root causes of production delays and drive continuous improvement programs. 

All of this can be done in less time than ever before, since vendors have direct access to streamlined, formatted historical data. 

Watch our webinar with Dr Hanson Li, Director of Quality Assurance and Traceability Program at Value Source Group to see how Inspectorio digital tracking can reshape your supply chain.