Risk is defined as something that creates or suggests a hazard with the possibility of loss or injury. In manufacturing, all kinds of risks threaten the key performance metrics of cost, quality, and speed, so identifying and lowering risk is critical to improving operational performance.

If you use FIFO as your costing method, you might be confused as to which valuation report you should use to reconcile your inventory balance with the accounting software after a period end post.

MISys has TWO item valuation reports and these reports yield somewhat different results.

In many manufacturing environments, the replenishment of Bulk items to a Work Center is triggered by a Kanban signal that goes to the stock room. This is common with visual replenishment methods such as ‘Two-Bin’ or ‘Kanban Cards’.

The term Bill of Material (BOM) can be misleading because in many manufacturing systems, the BOM can contain not only Materials, but also Routing Operations like a recipe. When Material is combined with Operations, the Bill of Material is often referred to as a Bill of Manufacturing.

Improvement Projects and Manufacturing Control rely on good data to track progress. A straightforward way to get data from a Manufacturing System is with a data export. For example, the actual run times for an operation can be exported to excel in a few minutes. Once exported you can quickly run some basic statistical tests in Excel or Minitab to confirm the data is normally distributed around the mean, which includes detecting data outliers that could adversely impact decisions made from those results.