Shop floor control in a garment factory
Shop floor control (SFC) is the layer that records what actually happened on the line — which operator did which operation, on which bundle, at what time. Planning sits above it and payroll sits below it.
What is shop floor control in garment manufacturing?
Shop floor control records production as it happens on the sewing line: which operator completed which operation on which bundle, and when. It sits between production planning, which decides what should run, and payroll, which pays for what was finished. Without it, both work from estimates.
How is shop floor control different from ERP?
An ERP manages orders, materials and money at the business level. Shop floor control works at the level of a single bundle passing a single machine. An ERP can tell you an order is late. Shop floor control tells you which operation it is stuck behind, right now.
What a garment SFC layer has to capture
- Bundle identity — lot, article, colour, size and component, on a scannable label
- Operation — which step in the route this scan represents
- Operator and machine — who did it, on what
- Timestamp — for WIP age and line balance
- Quality outcome — pass, defect type, or rework routing
Scan ERP captures all five on a QR scan taken with an operator’s own Android phone. Piece-rate pay is computed from that same record, which is why the pay figure and the production figure cannot disagree.
Where it sits in the stack
Planning decides the schedule. Shop floor control records the execution. Payroll and costing read from that record. Most disputes in a CMT factory come from these three layers holding different numbers — see garment MES software for how the eleven classical MES functions map onto a sewing floor, including the ones Scan ERP does not attempt.
What changes once execution is recorded
The first thing a factory notices is not a report. It is that the argument stops. When pay is computed from the same scan that recorded production, an operator disputing their earnings and a supervisor defending the count are reading the same record, so the dispute resolves in seconds instead of days.
The second is bottleneck visibility. A line starved of work shows up while the shift is running, not in tomorrow’s summary. On a floor with 400 or more live bundles, stuck work is the normal failure mode rather than an exception, which is why Scan ERP detects and resets a stuck operation automatically instead of waiting for a supervisor to file a ticket.
SFC, MES and ERP in one sentence each
- ERP — orders, materials and money at the business level
- MES — the broader manufacturing execution layer, of which shop floor control is one function
- SFC — the record of what physically happened at each machine
Vendors use all three words loosely, and some sell an ERP while describing MES capability. The distinction that matters to a buyer is whether the system records execution at the bundle level or infers it from order status.
What it takes to deploy on a sewing floor
No servers and no IT team. Operators scan on their own $50 Android handsets, so there are no proprietary scanners to buy, replace or repair. A Raspberry Pi on the LAN caches scans and absorbs brief WiFi drops. Two weeks is typical from paper bundle tickets to a line scanning, and the subscription is $4 per machine per month or $0.005 per piece, whichever bills lower.