Production tracking for mold and die shops

Why mold shop deadlines slip

Mold making is project work. Every tool is different, parts take different paths through different machines, and assembly can only start when the last part arrives. When tracking lives on a whiteboard or in a spreadsheet, the trouble usually looks like this:

• At assembly, someone discovers a slide is still waiting in the EDM queue.
• Three molds need the same wire EDM machine and the order is settled by phone calls.
• Parts recut after a design change never get recorded, so time and cost look lower than they were.
• The next mold is quoted without knowing how many hours the last one really took.

Each mold is a project

ModernMES has no separate "mold" record. A mold is opened as a project with its customer, due date and budget. The project's parts are the mold's parts: A and B plates, core, cavity inserts, ejector plate, slides. Each part gets a routing made of the operations you define.

Projects can be split into phases such as design, manufacturing and tryout. Operation names and order are entirely yours, and sinker EDM, wire EDM or polishing can each be tracked as their own resource group.

On the floor: route card, barcode, terminal

A route card is printed for each mold, with a barcode or QR code for every step of every part. At the machine, or on their own phone paired with a QR code, the operator scans their badge, scans the step and starts the job. They pick a reason when they pause and enter good and scrap quantities when they finish.

The stops that cost a mold shop the most are built-in reasons: setup and changeover, first-piece approval, tool breakage or change, waiting for material. At the end of a month you know how much machine time went into setups and waiting.

Rework does not disappear: a finished step can be restarted as a revision, and the time spent recutting the part is recorded too.

See the bottleneck before assembly day

The deadline feasibility card on each project compares the mold's remaining work with the capacity of each resource group up to the due date, after the other open work already queued there. If wire EDM is booked solid until the deadline, the card names it as the bottleneck and estimates a finish date. It does not model setup sequence or operator availability; its job is to move the surprise earlier than assembly day.

The live shop floor view and per-group TV boards show which mold's part is on which machine. The production status report covers workload, plan versus actual and operator hours, and every table exports to Excel.

Real hours for the next quote

When a mold ships, you have the actual minutes for every operation on every part. Each night ModernMES recalculates the typical (median) time of every operation from that history and suggests it on new routings, so EDM and machining hours on the next quote come from records instead of estimates.

First-piece and final inspection results are kept on the work order with defect types and photos. Machines can have periodic maintenance plans, and finished work can be booked in your ERP through the ERP integration add-on.

Frequently asked questions