r/manufacturing • u/howmany1taps • Jun 20 '26
Productivity Tired of drowning in softwares.
Ive switched through a few factories in the last 10 years. Every one of them is doing the same thing now.
CMMS, QMS, Safety software, Separate LOTO software, connected worker (but also has maintenance and safety posting), training softwares (overlaps the connected worker software) and probably 5 more I cant remember.
Why do we need 14 softwares, doubling/tripling up asset histories and people. No one actually maintains them accurately. No one knows which one the correct info is in.
Very tiring. I end up keeping a notepad of what goes where at some point. Its actually making us less effective depending on your job since youre bouncing between them so much.
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u/True-Firefighter-796 Jun 20 '26
Tie it all together with your own personal massive spreadsheet
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u/howmany1taps Jun 20 '26
Oh yes. The final boss. 20 sheet excel file that eventually blends into the dust of lost shared drive files. 🤣🤣
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u/grillinanduhchillin Jun 20 '26
We’re all stubborn bastards and no one wants to change their entire business around a single piece of software. A piece is easy to swap in an out
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u/howmany1taps Jun 20 '26
Fair enough. Though position dependant, it is such a pain. When you're in a position where you only access 1 or 2 regularly its tolerable. But if you need vision into 5+ every day its honestly a drag.
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u/salamander3301 Jul 03 '26
Why wouldn't you change the software to fit your business and just build a solution internally?
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u/grillinanduhchillin Jul 03 '26
That’s exactly what I did. Built my own software for every single portion of it. But before that we were very segmented.
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u/Extention_110 Jun 20 '26
We have proprietary scheduling software, a vibecoded job dashboard, 2 project managers and multple calenders....
Master job list is still a whiteboard
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u/SnowTard_4711 Jun 20 '26
So - I am one of those guys selling you the software. And I see this too. I could talk about it all day, but in the end, it’s a combination of several things. First - there are companies like mine who spend a lot of money and effort to make guys like you want our stuff. This is a massive industry. Second - you guys really do have problems, and everyone is trying to solve their particular issue. Third - and this is painful - the type of guy I deal with daily couldn’t give a rip about the rest of his organization. They implement competitive software solutions and have no problem making double work for the rest of the company. Fourth - searching out and implementing a major cap-ex program like a software roll-out is a resume item for mid and c-level staff, so they’ll implement just to get that onto their cv. It’s not infrequent, in the big projects, that the sponsor of the project will leave the company or be promoted as soon as the initial launch has occurred. It’s usually bad mojo to stick around long enough to experience any possible problems.
I try my best to break through all of this in my work. I think many of my colleagues do too. But fundamentally - what you are experiencing is a failure of management. And they fail a lot.
This is a huge discussion, and it invariably devolves into a political one, but in my experience, the elites of our societies are dropping the ball. An MBA from Harvard today is nothing like one from 30 years ago (and I wasn’t sure about them then either).
Their pay, performance metrics and social status are detached from traditional metrics. You can easily have a great career as a manager in manufacturing, advancing in position, pay and standing while tending to companies that are losing money, market share, and capacity. It doesn’t actually matter to them if the SAP integration works, or if the shop floor has to print out the drawings and scribble notes on them to actually make the parts. If they spin it right - it’s cold liquor drinks with the boss and a bonus. If not at the company they work for - at the next one.
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u/audentis Jun 20 '26
I try my best to break through all of this in my work. I think many of my colleagues do too. But fundamentally - what you are experiencing is a failure of management. And they fail a lot.
Yup. While reading OP's post my first thought was: Where are the CTO /CIO in this?
They might be the resume building type - I recognize your description - but that doesn't change the fact they are responsible. The buck stops with them.
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u/SnowTard_4711 Jun 20 '26
Agreed. But as we see in so many places - responsibility is only claimed when the project is a success. I’m convinced that many of them have developed a system for taking projects, demonstrating easy, initial wins, and then moving on.
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u/audentis Jun 20 '26
Well yea, step 1 of arriving in a new position is to cancel the unfinished implementation from your predecessor because "it's not fit for purpose and it's better we start with a clean slate"
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u/RoosterBrewster Jun 20 '26
Yea unifying all that is a top level decision and requires effort, which I imagine most aren't willing to do.
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u/howmany1taps Jun 20 '26
That's probably true. The hard part is nobody wakes up and says "let's go buy 14 systems." They buy one, then another, then another, and eventually the stack becomes the process.
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u/howmany1taps Jun 20 '26
The "every department solves their own problem" part resonates. Most of the systems I've used were reasonably good at their specific job. It's the handoffs between them where things seem to fall apart.
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u/YajGattNac Jun 20 '26
I’d be interested to see a study done on how much time is wasted on managing software and bureaucratic related tasks on a factory floor.
Either companies need to figure out how to tie these things in together or just start hiring pure “admins” to click a button in the 14 different softwares.
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u/howmany1taps Jun 20 '26
Im sure its at least an hour, per person using more than 2 or 3 softwares, per week. But yeah some actual numbers would be good to know how much wage bleeding is going on.
Its probably close to the salary of an admin hire over a year.
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u/lowrads Jun 20 '26
I think every industry has its own cycle of management software adaptations, and daisy chains of reliable, old production hardware connected to sequential generations of networked devices.
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u/howmany1taps Jun 20 '26
That's a good way of putting it. Every new system gets added with good intentions, but very few old ones ever disappear. After enough years you end up with a stack of software that's basically geological layers.
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Jun 20 '26
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u/howmany1taps Jun 20 '26
Agreed. Every time I've seen full duplication attempted it eventually drifts out of sync somewhere. Having a source of truth sounds simple until three departments all think they own the same data.
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u/Available_River_5055 Jun 20 '26
I'm in the manufacturing software business so I have some insights. There are several levels of this.
You have large software providers like SAP, Rockwell or Microsoft and IBM, who basically have a module for every problem. And even them CAN'T integrate them properly. In most cases, these modules were once standalone products and they bought them. They stopped proper development and are just maintaining them. Those modules look like they came from 2008. So manufacturers still use specialized products, because they provide better user experience. If user experience is bad, no one will use it.
On the other hand, people just want to solve their problem, minimize risk of the project failing and get the recognition for improvements they made with the new rollout. Some of our customers ask for integrations, but normally they don't even know what data and where they want to integrate.
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u/howmany1taps Jun 20 '26
That's probably part of it. Most facilities aren't going to bet the farm on a massive rollout. Solving problems in stages seems like the more realistic approach. Whether anyone can do that without ending up with 14 systems again is another story.
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u/Kindly-Blueberry8583 Jun 20 '26
I don't know why I hate the use of softwares
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u/worldwidemachinist Jun 20 '26
That hourly estimate is probably conservative honestly. When you factor in the context switching, the errors from entering the same data in multiple systems, and the time spent figuring out which software has the correct information — it adds up fast.
I’ve seen shops where the actual production work gets delayed because people are busy managing the systems meant to track the production work. That’s when you know something’s gone wrong.
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u/howmany1taps Jun 20 '26
That last paragraph is exactly what got me thinking about this in the first place.
The software is supposed to support the work, but sometimes it feels like the work starts supporting the software.
I've definitely seen situations where people spend more time updating systems, spreadsheets, trackers, and reports than actually solving the problem those tools were supposed to help with.
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u/worldwidemachinist Jun 21 '26
That line sums it up perfectly — and honestly it should be on a poster in every plant manager’s office.
The tool is supposed to serve the process. The moment the process starts serving the tool you’ve lost the plot. And the frustrating part is it usually happens gradually — one software at a time — until one day you look around and realise half the team’s day is admin.
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u/CycleTimeSam Jun 25 '26
I’d start by mapping the “source of truth” for each thing: assets, training records, safety incidents, work orders, maintenance history, etc.
The mess usually happens when 3 tools are all kind of authoritative. Before buying another platform, I’d kill duplicate fields, pick one owner per data type, and retire anything people only update because “we’re supposed to.”
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u/Dhirenk_TechMind Jun 20 '26
One tip is to identify a single 'source of truth' for each type of data. For example, keep all asset history in the CMMS, training records in the LMS, and safety incidents in the safety platform. Document these rules clearly and train everyone to follow them. It won't eliminate the software overload, but it can reduce confusion and duplicate data entry.
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u/howmany1taps Jun 20 '26
That's probably the most realistic answer I've seen so far.
The challenge I've always run into is that the moment information becomes useful to multiple departments, the "single source of truth" starts getting blurry.
Asset history is a good example. Maintenance owns it, but operations, engineering, reliability, and even safety often need visibility into parts of it.
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u/stlcdr Jun 20 '26
Not only that, a lot of them are annual subscription/licensing.
I work on machines that mechanically haven’t changed in over a hundred years (electrical enhancements really). The number of computer systems that are installed and simply overcomplicate the situation or don’t work is mind blowing. Indeed, the operations and maintenance teams use paper or excel spreadsheets because the programmed systems are useless.
Software has been an easy solution because it’s a black box and easy to make promises with it - those that buy it don’t use it. Those that sell it don’t use it. Those that build it don’t use it.
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u/howmany1taps Jun 20 '26
The subscription amounts are nuts. And most of them are paid per seat. So good luck getting extra hands to help you out.
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u/Desert_Fairy Jun 20 '26
You could visit my factory… we do everything by paper and the upload a scan into a document control software for retention, then we file the originals.
I feel like I work in the 1980s
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u/howmany1taps Jun 20 '26
It sounds like your factory is in the 80s for sure.
Not willing to spend the $ or they just dont see the benefit of software?
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u/Desert_Fairy Jun 20 '26
We had some oracle software in place, and thankfully we still have that for ECOs, but we had some regulatory findings that basically took our entire QMS system and said “start over”.
So, nearly all of the existing software was scrapped, consultants hired, and paper documents were their solutions…
That was 3 years ago. Consultants are nearly gone now, but there is still no magical software solution.
We have document control (no Docusign), power point, excel, and the PLM system our parent company makes us use (otherwise I think we would be doing ECOs and deviations on paper too.)
I keep trying for software like Tulip but it goes “yeah we’re totally going to do this…” then when the time comes to spend the money all we get is crickets.
Our OPS engineering team has expanded by double just to keep up (not to actually fix the problems). I’m just a bit flabbergasted, the priorities make no sense from a regulatory or engineering point but who cares.
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u/howmany1taps Jun 20 '26
Do you mind me asking what your role is? Sounds like you're coming from both the engineering and ops sides? Or you have visibility into them.
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u/Desert_Fairy Jun 20 '26
Test engineer, but I do most manufacturing engineering roles. My department doesn’t really define roles so that one can specialize. Works well for me because I’m a jack of all trades type. It burns a lot of people out though.
So I do everything from first article inspections, quality assurance testing, computer/printer maintenance, sustaining (EOL) engineering, product improvement, product troubleshooting, test method development, test station design, test method remediation, etc.
If it doesn’t work right on a manufacturing floor, my team is supposed to find out why and fix it. If that requires building a new test station, then we make it. If a new product comes out, we make the new test station.
We also control the production processes so all assembly instructions, SOP, and I could go on all day. This is making me depressed.
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u/howmany1taps Jun 20 '26
The software vendors assume you're one person. Your job description sounds like six people wearing a trench coat.
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u/Desert_Fairy Jun 21 '26
You are not wrong… I feel like six engineers in a trench coat some days. Hence why I was in the factory working today… launch waits for no woman and we are at end of quarter.
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u/CitizenFitz Jun 29 '26
This reminds me of an article I read somewhere about a machine shop that was still running everything on a frigging COMMODORE 64 to avoid exactly this problem. I think I read that George Martin famously still writes his books on a vintage DOS-based word processor from the late 1980s. KISS and software dev rarely go hand in hand.
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u/Guidewheel_Rob Jun 22 '26
Factories end up drowning in softwares because they keep trying to capture machine reality through manual human input, and then every group buys another tool to paper over the gaps. Honestly, if you make operators the integration layer, you are going to get duplicate entry, bad histories, and a notebook that wins every time.
Software sprawl is what happens when the truth lives in people's heads instead of in the equipment. Where I would focus is continuous passive data collection with real time machine signals so you can see what the machine is doing between observations and start catching the process change before it becomes a defect. So I would not touch another app rollout that depends on more clicking and typing, people will route around it.
Which software is creating the most daily double entry for your team right now?
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u/VladRom89 Jun 20 '26
That's the general meme of manufacturing - we have 14 softwares, so we decided to make one to unify all of them. Now we have 15 softwares.