Shop Floor Control

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What Does Shop Floor Control Mean?

Shop floor control (SFC) systems are systems for managing the various components of the manufacturing process. This type of tool is a major part of business process automation, which industrial businesses are using to streamline workflows, promote efficiency and improve revenue cycles.

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Techopedia Explains Shop Floor Control

In many cases, shop floor control systems are integrated into larger enterprise systems for governing various business processes and aspects of business operations. Items like sales order management, inventory management and procurement are often bundled into vendor-supplied systems that help companies to maintain a bird’s-eye view of operations.

Companies can also look at various features for shop floor control systems, including specific work scheduling tools, tracking of metrics like quantity over time, and tools for tracking raw materials. Many of these systems also offer specific tools for packaging, which tie packaging processes into the big picture for good software process management.

Shop floor control features can be tied to sales order entry systems, to really automate much of the cycle for ordering. In other words, orders that come in can be directly applied to the shop floor control systems that govern assembly, packaging and everything that precedes the delivery of finished products.

Many of these tools also have top-level visuals that show how all of these features interact. The main goal, similar to other kinds of enterprise systems, is to make processes more transparent to human decision-makers. Much like different kinds of network reporting, shop floor control reporting shows what is actually happening in a physical manufacturing or industrial environment. This can be extremely valuable to executives or leaders the same way that many other kinds of business intelligence can promote efficiency and growth for businesses.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology expert

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of ​​a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.