The automotive manufacturing industry began small, with early autos being little more than replacements for the horse drawn buggies of the day. They used a steam or gas engine to replace the work done by the horse. Then, with Henry Ford’s innovative assembly line concepts, the automotive industry picked up speed. No longer were cars built one at a time by skilled craftsmen, now they could be built many at a time and the level of skill the workers needed was greatly reduced as they only worked on one part of the machine, over and over. The problems facing an automotive manufacturer like Henry Ford were certainly much different than they are today. The process of assembling a Model T was by any modern standard few steps and very simple ones as well.

Today’s automotive manufacturer has to design and implement processes to cover a wide range of issues Henry Ford could never have imagined. With hydraulic, electrical, computer and drive systems all failure prone areas which require accurate, concise processes to be assembled efficiently and reliably, more than just the human touch is required. That is where the computers of the modern age come in. More specifically, that is where automotive manufacturing software solutions come into play.

How Can Software Help?

There are very few industries today that don’t leverage the benefits of manufacturing management software and the auto industry is no different. Putting together a modern car relies on many thousands of processes coming together and working seamlessly together. Without some kind of automotive manufacturing software solution, tracking and monitoring all of these processes would be an impossible task. By using software for process management, countless hours of tedious process design and testing can be accomplished on the computer, not on the factory floor where every part wasted and minute of downtime count. Read the rest of this entry »