Work in Progress Overview

WIP Methodologies

Typically there are two approaches the WIP Management. Job Level and Job Line (or Sub Job Level). The approach you choose is dependent on the size of your company and the level of granularity required both on the production floor and in any related metrics.

M-Power also offers a third, hybrid option called the timing recipe which is outlined below and encompasses the best of both approaches. 

First an overview of the two core methods:

Job Level Management

You would choose Job Level Management if you are only interested in each job as a whole and job status/tagging will provide enough granularity for you to understand how your workload is progressing through your plant. 

You can still use barcode scanning to capture working times if managing WIP at the job level as long as you are creating job cards incorporating the processes you want to track. 

Typically when using Job Level WIP management status changes for each job are manual.

Job Line or Sub Job Management

You would choose Job Line or Sub Job Management when you want to have visibility and control over each individual line (recipe) within a job and you want recorded timing to be assigned at the job line level rather than just at the job level.

A jobcard is produced for each line and they can travel through the plant individually.

M-Power's Hybrid Timing Recipe Approach

Starting with the same job and job lines we can consolidate the processes and materials into a single timing recipe. This is used for tracking progress, accrued time, and other metrics for the job as a whole but encompasses all of the processes, their related predicated times and materials, and their required quantities.

This provides a single simplified jobcard on the production floor but loses none of the granularity of information on each individual job line and related recipe.

Concepts

Regardless of the methodology chosen, there are a number of core concepts used to make managing your Work In Progress more transparent and simple.

M-Power uses a hierarchy of dates and statuses from the top-level job down to the individual process within a job line and any related resource assignments.

Below is an image to help visualise this hierarchy. You can choose the point in the hierarchy that you use for managing Work in Progress depending on your needs and the complexity of your business.

Each job has a relative scale or level of complexity which is correlated to the load it places on your resources and time during manufacture.

Each job is also, at any one moment, somewhere between not started and complete. The level of completion or progress percentage can be used in conjunction with the hierarchy of due dates to determine if a job is on-time, behind, or overdue.

Choosing a WIP Method for your business