Information Systems- MANUFACTURING IS

Input transaction documents

• Production programme
• Production schedule
• Process planning sheet
• Job card
• Job status advice
• Quality assurance rating form
• Finished goods advice
• Breakdown advice
• Material requirement
• Material requisition 
• Customer order

Data from Accounting

•  Quantity of production with respect to a time period
•  Material requirement and usage
•  Rejection quantity at each stage
•  Breakdown incidence
•  Labour completement wrt  period
•  Use of power fuel and consumables
•  Machine and facilities utilization
•  Labour hours

Queries Handled

•  Status of the job or order in terms of level of completion
•  Production program and job schedules
•  Load status on machine, group of machines
•  Status on availability of machines
• Information on machine and tool specification
•  Information on skills and capabilities of each worker
• Info on products and process 

The manufacturing IS is required for making numerous decisions some of the typical uses are as follows

•  Make or buy
•  Make or subcontract
•  Use of alternative material
•  Use of alternative process
•  Evolving optimum product mix/ job mix
•  Rescheduling and loading of jobs
•  Planning and scheduling of jobs
•  Selection of production facilities
• Selection of alternative maintenance policies

 Controls used to highlight exceptions in the system

•  Excessive product rejection on account of material and/or process
•  Hold up of key jobs beyond a certain limit
•  Excessive work in process inventory
•  Continued breakdown of the manufacturing facility beyond a certain period
•  Utilisation of key facilities beyond a limit
•  Continuous significant deviation from standards or norms of production rate
•  Backlog of large number of orders and failure to meet promised delivery date

Reports
Statutory compliance – some industries need to submit account of raw and finished goods to govt
Information update
Operations Update – production per day, rejections, machine breakdown and job completed
Decision analysis- optimum product mix, alternate loading pattern, alternate assignment of jobs and machines..etc
Action Update- provide information update on post implementation scenario of decisions

Information Systems - Marketing Information Systems

Information systems can be classified on the basis of the functional areas they support, Production, Finance, Marketing, Human Resources etc. The image below shows the functional areas for which Information systems is available and how they support the management.

We are going to discuss about the Marketing Information System. The scope of Marketing Information System consists of

Enquiry- Order – Despatch – Invoice – Customer relations

Marketing Information System has a very strong interface with production and finance departments and relies on production for uninterrupted supply of goods and stock replenishment . It is responsible for forecasting of sales, evolving marketing strategies, pricing, product designing and launching. The challenging tasks of marketing information system are retaining market share, penetrating into new markets assessing customer response to new product launch.

Input transaction documents:

To facilitate the Marketing Information System certain Documents are fed into the system, they are as follows.

• Customer order
• Order acceptance
• Delivery note
• Invoice, credit note, debit note.

It also draws heavily from sources such as market survey  market research studies conducted by the company and  industry data

Data from Accounting :

In addition the Marketing Information System also gets a lot of data from the accounting department like

1. Product sale
2. Product family
3. Sales value
4. Sales tax
5. Dealer, receivables
6. Distributor, returns
7. Customer, Area
8. Excise duty
9. Zone , area
10. Inventory, complaints

Once all the data is loaded into the system it is ready to take queries from users and respond to them.

 Queries Made:

There are three types of queries which can be made in the Marketing Information System, they are as follows

• Single dimensional -   Data is available in the same database/ single variable eg: What is the sales data for the month of Novemeber

• Multi dimensional -  Data is spread across different database / multiple variables needs to be compared  eg: What is the sales data for the month of November by Different sales persons

• Most queries on basic data -  day to day queries which needs to be answered eg: Is a product available?

Reports :

Every information system generates certain reports the reports are as follows

Statutory compliance - Mandatory reports which are generated to comply with government or regulatory bodies, eg: Reports to stock market or government agencies about annual sales

Information updates - Reports which are generated to give update about day to day operations eg: Updates to managers about sales targets achieved

Product sales ledger - This is nothing but the complete sales data for the company

Sales summaries - This report contains details about each sale like who  it was sold and how much units and the batch number or serial number of the products and the price it was sold for

Accounts receivable - When company sells products on a credit period we need  to monitor when the credit period ends and have to collect money owned, this is maintained in accounts receivables.

Orders received and accepted- It is a live order board which helps to fulfil customer orders and coordinate with manufacturing department to produce products required to fill customer order 

Sales analysis- It shows how much sales each agent has done, comparison of sales over years and other analysis based on sales data

Market analysis & Competition analysis - done based on external data collected from Industry body

Operations update
These are reports generated for the day to day operations of the marketing department.

• Order book - After each order is accepted the sales person will update the database, this will be consolidated and send to the managers everyday on pre-set time automatically
• Despatch report- Once a order is shipped, the Marketing Information System will send updates to the customer and the agent responsible for managing the client a report that the order is despatched.
• Inventory - periodic inventory data will me sent to all agents 
• Customer complaints - All customer complaints will be sent to the managers and agents regularly
• Complaints disposed - the solved complaints list will also be shared
• Decision analysis - after every resolution a decision analysis report will be generated

Some of the Real Life applications of Information systems are in the areas as shown in the image below.