Work-in-Process, also known as Work in Progress (WIP), is a term which describes materials that have entered the production process and are at different stages of completion in a production or supply chain environment.
The problem of locating work orders is not new in manufacturing and there are many existing approaches to solving it. One approach relies purely on manual input from your employees – having them fill in a form with information about a Work Order each time it arrives at a work center for processing. As any system relying on manual input, this system is prone to human error, which can cause your company’s percent of on-time delivery to drop and increase labour costs, as employees go about looking for work orders that are not where they are supposed to be.
Enabling RTLS technology to track WIP during manufacturing production provides vital data that can be accessed in real-time to give shopfloor managers greater visibility into the production process. Most manufacturing environments require products to go through a series of manufacturing processes or stages. This is where RTLS technology provides the advantage: each work order (e.g in a bin) can be uniquely identified using JAPP BLE Beacon tags. As WIP passes from station to station, the tags provide information on the status of the components as each stage of the manufacturing process is reached. The information is then relayed to the JAPP WIP Tracking System to allow for an efficient and timely recording of data. JAPP’s benefit on tracking WIP extends beyond production status visibility; it also works to notify the depletion of raw materials for efficient inventory management and completion data can be recorded for Quality Control inspection purposes.