Hi Friends,
I would like to know use cases of people using Asana in the Manufacturing industry.
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I work for a company in manufacturing and use Asana a lot. Anything specific youâre wanting tips on?
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Hi Crystal,
I would like to know if you monitor Production in your company using Asana if so how, secondly I would like to know how you prioritize your TODAY tasks, Example two tasks might be due today, but one of the tasks might be related to an earlier deadline project than the other, thirdly my team mates change their due dates at their own wish not knowing that it will delay the project, what system do you have to avoid this.
Regards
SDKarkuvel
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We donât use Asana for manufacturing scheduling at the moment but we do use it for tracking in other ways, and always looking for ways to use it more. Examples include:
- non-conformances/quality issues.
- Maintenance and engineering tasks.
Hereâs an example of a task in our quality tracking project, generated by a customer complaint.
The project itself is a board, with the columns labeled for the various stages of our quality issues process.
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Prioritizing Today tasks is a broad topic and quite dependent on personal working styles. A simple fix could be manually organizing your Today list based on the project deadlines. You could make this show on tasks using a Custom Field. (But thereâs no date option to automatically sort as far as I know.)
Personally I find it useful to add sections under Today. For example using the Eisenhower decision matrix:
- Important and Urgent,
- Not Important but Urgent,
- Important but not Urgent
- Not Important and Not Urgent
I have an âUnsortedâ section at the bottom of my TODAY list so upcoming task immediately go there when they come due. I prioritize these at the beginning of each day.
These tips arenât specific to manufacturing and might not work for everyone but hopefully you can find something helpful there 
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I also work for a manufacturer. Primary use of Asana is for new item setup. A high percentage of our SKUs are private label for multiple retailers and as we bring on new business, our new item setup form helps us manage everything from setup of the item in our MRP system to graphics, product development, QA reviews, etc. We previously used a spreadsheet but everyone complained they didnât know when tasks were due or completed. Asana really helps us manage that part of our business quite well.
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Hey Karkuvel,
I used asana for our small sign shop to organize jobs on a board under different stages of production to keep track what jobs were at what stage. my first collumn was âquotesâ next was âproofingâ then âready for productionâ âprintingâ âlaminatingâ âready for pickupâ âto be billedâ etc. and then I would move the job along each stage so I could easily see where everything was. 
Hope this helps! Iâll see if I can figure out how to attach a photo to show you.
Cheers!
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thank you so much! Nancy.
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Hi, we use asana comprehensively in our factory to track works orders through multiple departments. from our machine shop using the timeline view to plan our production schedule to our tracking work through each of our finishing shops right through to warehouse. we also use asana to log and communicate customer chases to the customer service team. Id be happy to share more details with you if you want. Itâs not ideal that we havenât got something like this running within our sales CRM software, but what they offer simply isnât anywhere near the usability we can get out form asana- so the negatives are well outweighed by the positives.
happy to talk more as i have spent a lot of time getting this to all work for us.
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Hi Rob,
Thanks for your input, is there any way you record production on your shopfloor in ASANA.
Regards,
SDKarkuvel Ram.
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Hi Karkyvel, how do you mean exactly?
We track every order through asana, In our finishing shop where we have multiple stages (dressing, polsihing, plating, bronzing, lacquering, inspection, etc.) each department is set up as a user and the main task is the job. This job then gets assigned to the relevant department (user) as they move through the processes and then once booked in to our warehouse the task is ticked off as complete.
In our machine shop we plan in the timeline view as we have a line for each machine and then a user for each setter - this way we can ensure no machine or setter gets double booked and the production schedule can be kept. This is reviewed daily.
We have also taken this further and logged some time data from asana by having custom fields where we fill in setting time, cycle time, loading time etc of the machines to then export to excel and report on.
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We use Asana in our manufacturing business, but we have set up our Asana in a completely different way to itâs intended use.
Our jobs are âtasksâ and our âProjectsâ are the different stages of the job (or the job flow). We move the tasks between each âprojectâ or buckets as we call them. This tracks a job from quote stage all the way to invoicing.
We allow a task to be in multiple buckets at once.
We use custom fields to track what machines each job is required to go on, if it has started and when itâs finished on machine and each area.
We then use Asana for job installation scheduling too, which then links with a 3rd party scheduling app (TSheets).
All our reporting and BI is through another 3rd party app which gives as an insane amount of data with live dashboards for our customers to track where jobs are in our system, as well as other things like average lead time, next available install date, their staff performace, etc etc
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Great to see other manufacturers using this. All the case studies/examples you ever see seem to be tech companies or design studios.
We produce high end hardware for kitchens, bedrooms, bathrooms etc. (www.armacmartin.co.uk) So have thousands of items moving through our building daily. Keeping track of all of them is so important to ensure we can keep our customers happy.
Our next stage may be to look at a way of integrating asana into SAP so when a new works order is raised on SAP it automatically creates it in asana (at the moment its all manual input by our stores team to get the ball rolling) then possibly look at a bar code scanning system for updating the job status.
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@Rob_McGrail Itâs totally revolutionised our business. Itâs such a customisabile tool, and so great to see how everybody has their own different way of using it.
In terms of integration with SAP this is totally possible. Look API integrations:
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Hi Joel,
Thanks for the response. How easy are these integrations to set up? would i need someone on site with decent knowledge on API etc to really get the full power out of one of these softwares?
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Hi Rob,
Yeah, itâs definitely not something youâll be able to work out without some coding experience.
We use GROW as our BI tool, they have recently simplified dashboard set-ups, but depending on the way you have set up Asana and how much data you need to pull it can get very complicated - https://www.gogrow.com/login
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Hi Rob,
We are a garment manufacturer, example a particular order/project has 100000 units to be produced, as indicated by you, they move through different stages, Is there any way you could suggest to monitor the units completed at each stage, so that at any given time we can give the client a realtime info. right now we use Excel.
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