Mobile Applications in Data Acquisition for Production Planning and Control

The evolution of technologies, coupled with the constant and fast growth of mobile communication network structures, has promoted the development of technological solutions in different business sectors, particularly in manufacturing companies. To help the companies to become and/or remain more competitive, management and production planning requires progressively more prompt and effective decisions, in order to increase the productivity and reduce production costs. This article presents a mobile application, developed for an Android platform that was implemented and tested in a Portuguese company. This application allows the recording and storage of data, with the main objective of supporting the production planning and control. In addition to the development, implementation and testing of the application, a study of the usability impact of the application in the company was also performed. This was done not only by covering the production process optimization, but also as the feasibility of its use by human resources.