Production Control Systems
The differences between production control systems are numerous. There are canned systems that take a one size fits all approach and there are tailored systems that offer a lot of flexability but require some effort from your team to define. A proactive team is a really important requirement if you're looking at putting together a highly configured system. The advantage of a flexable systems are numerous though, gains in process capability, efficiency and the ability to figure out who needs more education on the floor are generally the payoff. 
Highly configurable systems are outpacing canned systems and providing a path for innovation. Advancements in browser based technology are enabling agile deployment strategies.
Manufacturing software helps manufacturers improve production performance by providing visable control and reporting across the enterprise.
There area many types of production control systems. Some form of traditional statistical process control is always benificial and having the data in a computer is really a good idea. There is nothing quite like knowing you have a stack of data that you can't query. In addition to SQC and SPC many companies use OEE systems, these systems study production efficiency and performance. While many systems collect data from employees, there are also systems that collect the information from programmable controls on the plant floor. Many of these systems also incorporate scrap or defect reporting as well as machine downtime information. There are also hybrid control systems that can join all of these datasets together. Closed loop manufacturing is sort of a recipe management technology created by Tuppas Software. The idea is to record with a PLC historian and or MMI (man machine interface) the control data as jobs are run, as well as putting data into computer based SPC, SQC and efficiency reporting systems. Closed loop production control systems allow you to combine the dataset. So that if you want to find out the best way to produce a given product on a given machine, the system filters through the production data to find the best historical runs and then it presenets you with the production data that made those runs possible.
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