• To provide speedy and accurate quotations in response to customer enquiries;
• Quotations should be able to be electronically submitted to the customer;
• An online enquiry processing system should be available.

• To allow all aspects of the production job to be defined, and for the information to be communicated to all areas of the business, ensuring that the production job will be completed in accordance with the customer's requirements and available for delivery on an agreed date;
• The creation of the production estimate should update the production planning and shop floor systems.

• The functionality must provide for a smooth administration of the sales order processing cycle from the initial order confirmation to final shipment.

• Typically, production orders are created in response to sales orders placed by customers. However, systems must also allow for the creation of a production order prior to a confirmed sales order for situations where a customer requests that minimum inventory balances are maintained. The created production orders must generate estimated/standard costs, production routing information and material requirements for each job. Simultaneously an electronic works instruction would be created, which can be printed or viewed on-screen.
  

• The system will provide for the management of all types of inventory including:

• Barcode scanning facilities should be available, with options for production of box, pallet and reel labels.
• The forward planning of raw material requirements is essential for companies in a contract or supply chain environment.
• Job costing and performance reporting:
• The comparison of the actual usage, times, costs recorded with those included in the sales and production estimates;
• The reporting will provide for all production standards to be monitored on an ongoing basis, and revised as appropriate;
• Integration to production planning and shop floor data collection systems is becoming increasingly important.
• Financial accounting:
• The financial accounting modules, including sales, purchase and nominal ledgers, should ideally be included in the total MIS provided;
• Alternatively, the MIS supplier should provide a proven means of interface to an alternative system.

Systems should also provide specific functionality for individual industry product sectors and it is strongly recommended that companies choose only from systems that have this specific functionality.

Additional features

The following highlights some of the additional functionality that the MIS should provide in addition to supporting the base business functions.

Materials requirement planning

Print customers are demanding their print and packaging supplier to be more responsive than ever before. This places the onus on the printer to ensure that materials are available to support the requirement to produce the customer order on time.

A typical material planning cycle will be as follows:

Record customer demand:

This can be sales orders, forecasts or shipping requests which can either be entered directly into the MIS system or can be imported via an electronic interface.

• Run material requirement planning process:
• This would provide an indication of when the customer job can be produced by reviewing the current production planning schedule. The planning would also indicate when materials are required to be available to support the production plan.

Create production order:

• Based on the results of the previous exercise, the system should either allow manual or automatic creation of the production order. This would also take account of any finished products already in stock or in WIP. The relationship between the planned production and the material required by date should then be maintained and monitored.

Production planning and scheduling

The production planning and scheduling system should provide a graphical representation of the work loaded to each work centre across the production environment.

The planner must be advised of all new or amended production jobs to be scheduled.

Variable planning horizons should be available.

All production details should be supported by 'task bars' that may be sized from a single line to multi lines allowing for user-defined pieces of task-specific information to be displayed. This eliminates the objection that because display is restricted by PC screen size, the conventional wall-based planning boards should be maintained.

The scheduling process should include: forward scheduling to maximise utilisation, backward scheduling to minimise storage and produce just in time.

Allocation of technical attributes would allow definition of capability groups of work centres where tasks may be moved automatically between work centres to spread loadings.

Options should allow the whole board to be coloured depending on a number of criteria such as Late/On-time, Held/Free, Shop Floor Status, Prior Task Status etc.

One of the key requirements of a production planning and scheduling system is to allow monitoring of other 'resource dependencies' such as customer approval, plate/cylinder and material availability which may be attached to each task.

Tasks should be able to be dragged between work centres with full control over the warning of possible error conditions.

Shop floor data collection

The system should provide options for both a manual input of shop floor information and for direct connection to production equipment.

Both types of data collection would be via a data collection unit (DCU), possibly a PC (with a touch-sensitive screen) located on the factory floor.

A manual DCU should be able to simultaneously run multiple jobs with multiple operators logged on to each job and recording their own input. A dedicated DCU would have a single count input and therefore only run a single job at a time with a single principle operator logged on. This should be extended to allow assistant operator logon.

A variety of job information functionality should be provided at the DCU to assist the operator when selecting a job to run and for reference during its processing. The following information should be available:

• Work list: The work list screen must provide an ordered list of the jobs scheduled to be run on each production centre.
• Job plan: The job plan should list all components and processes for a job showing their current production status. This would allow the operator to check the production of previous processes prior to starting a job.
• Works instructions: Access to screens showing the works instructions that have been generated for the job.

Whilst a job is running, the operator must be able to change the job status e.g. make ready, good copy, bad copy (waste or downtime), or sort at the click of a button. For each of the four status types a further set of status codes should be defined from which the operator can select a specific status code when changing status.

During job processing, the system should create a discrete record for every event that takes place. An event should be recorded for operator log-on/log-off, job start/suspend/complete, shift change and most importantly whenever there is a change of status. An event is keyed by Work Centre, Operator, Shift, Job and Status Code and records the start time, elapse time and quantity. This is the core of the data capture system and provides comprehensive and flexible analysis of the data.

Interface to other third party systems

Companies installing an MIS are looking for the system to provide the majority of options they require and will still feel more comfortable with a single source of supply. There will be situations where interface to third party products is required and it is becoming more important that the MIS provides the facilities to effect the required interface with the minimum of bespoke development.

The interface requirements can be both internal and external, and may include both import and export of information.

The type of interface required may include:

• Electronic customer orders, forecasts, and call-offs;
• Interface to third party financial accounting systems;
• Receipt of advanced shipping notes;
• Issue of supplier purchase orders;
• Interface to third party production planning systems;
• Interface to third party shop floor data collection systems;
• Support for vendor management inventory.
  

The message to the MIS supplier is that the more comprehensive their offering, the less likely will be a requirement for extensive interface to third party products. The print and packaging company looking to install an MIS system should not only consider their current requirements, but look to their future information processing needs, and be satisfied that the MIS supplier will be able to provide these facilities when required.

The MIS supplier should ensure that they clearly demonstrate the options that they are able to provide to support an individual company with its ongoing business strategies and objectives.