Cross-Platform Mobile PDC and what your company will gain

Mobile PDC (Plant Data Collection) is flexible for your business processes' needs and easily provides desired data at your fingertips.

It allows your shop floor employees to operate uninhibited in their daily work while also enabling them to work more efficiently. It feeds your executive team's data-driven strategic roadmap with reliable data that shapes your business's operational success for years to come. It provides your implementation team the flexibility to utilize multiple existing platforms and minimize the cost of new hardware.

Plant data collection is not a new concept. Plant data collection system improvements have been occurring since the first systems became mainstream in the 1980's. The most recent leap forward in PDC with leading small to mid size manufacturers has been going mobile and becoming cross-platform.

Cross-platform mobile applications have transformed PDC in the following ways:
 

1 - Cross-platform solutions enable hardware flexibility for the best integrated solution

Cross-platform solutions (iOS, Android, Windows) enable companies to utilize existing hardware, resulting in lower up-front costs during hardware purchasing, while still providing the benefit of mobile syncing with your company's ERP system transactional and master data. When a company has already invested significant capital in hardware and is looking to upgrade its process capabilities via software, having the flexibility of working with current hardware solutions can be the difference between having a project start on-time or waiting until next year's budget.

With these cross-platform solutions, an advanced mobile device management portal also functions across platforms, enabling MDM administrators to manage devices and licenses concurrently regardless of device type. This cross-platform MDM management means your hardware can go across platform, allowing your process to have the best physical configuration of devices and hardware within your facility, but your MDM administrator will only need to work in a single dashboard.

2 - Cross-platform mobile application development allows developers with different platform skillsets to collaborate for standard and custom development

When developing within a single platform, development can be stifled by the limitations of one's own team of internal or contracted developers or by your software developer's limited bandwidth due to balancing multiple projects for multiple customers. Having a cross-platform framework is like opening the floodgates for increased productivity. This structure allows users with different skillsets to collaborate, significantly increasing flexibility, resulting in leveraging of multiple teams' capabilities, shortened product lifecycle times, and easier talent procurement.

3 - Next generation MDM makes PDC configuration changes wireless

Mobile Device Management's wireless capabilities allow plant management to adjust PDC configurations based on facility needs without physically having to go out to the hardware that is down.

In the business case of machine-specific tracking, fixed machine stations may be set up to ensure guaranteed hardware access for operators. When fixed machine stations are down, mobile software licenses can be moved immediately via advanced mobile device management applications to new hardware by your company's administrator. This flexibility means that your floor's downtime is decreased when your hardware goes down, resulting in higher plant floor utilization and less disruption to your production lead times.

In summary, the improvements that have occurred with the development of cross-platform Mobile PDC can provide your company cost-savings, faster implementation lifecycles, easier talent procurement, and higher utilization, all important KPI's that successful companies consistently track and work to improve.

In an upcoming post, "How Your Company Will Improve from Mobile Production PDC with abas ERP", we'll discuss how your company can harness abas's next generation production solution for tangible, lasting business process improvement.

Find out more about abas ERP's cross platform (iOS, Android, Windows) mobile processes on our website, or request a product demo from our sales team.

Article Written By Brady Stephenson, CSCP, CPIM, Sr. Logistics Consultant/Project Manager at abas USA