CEO of Apikoan all-around software engineering and digital transformation consulting company that digitizes businesses worldwide.
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Integrating technology into different areas of your business enables you to reshape your workflows with new capabilities and innovative models. It can also foster unprecedented transparency among previously siled data.
While embarking on a digital transformation journey, there are two core aspects manufacturing businesses need to keep at the center of their efforts: achieving greater agility and portability. In my experience, adopting operational systems together with mobile apps can help you create a truly connected digital workflow in order to reach both of these targets.
Strategic Digital Transformation
Strategic digital transformation can bring fundamental changes in the way you operate and deliver value, namely:
• Enabling real-time data tracking and its collection across your organization.
• Streamlining workflows by optimizing and automating routine manual tasks.
• Connecting teams, data, assets and processes across the supply chain.
• Achieving faster time to market by introducing more agile business processes.
According to McKinsey, the successful implementation of digital tools and technologies can lead to a 10% to 30% increase in throughput, a 15% to 30% improvement in worker productivity and up to an 85% more accurate forecasting.
The Role Of Manufacturing Mobile Apps
With certain manufacturing operations often performed outside of the office, managing them can be complicated. Mobile apps, on the other hand, enable managing manufacturing operations on the go. They connect teams and gather data from anywhere inside an organization or in the field. With real-time analytics, you can get valuable insights into how your teams are performing and analyze their productivity.
Boosting Manufacturing Productivity
When looking into these types of manufacturing apps, find ones that will help you introduce transparency and accountability across all activities, projects and tasks and can cut out inefficiencies during production.
With real-time and remote access to all data, tracking where your employees are, how much time each worker spends on different tasks and how many tasks he completes in a day can streamline not only productivity but also invoicing and planning for the week.
For the best results, though, consider combining your time management app with project management functionality. Utilizing boards, lists, file sharing and calendars, together with time-tracking, can help you better prioritize and organize your activities on projects, optimize workflows and reveal more opportunities for time and cost savings.
Streamlining Production Automation
While the needs of every organization differ, so do the solutions. When you focus on technologies and start choosing digital tools without a clear connection to real value opportunities, specific business needs or challenges, you’ll find yourself in a place where you don’t have a clear understanding of how to achieve your desired ROI.
Custom-built software has the advantage of meeting manufacturing needs more precisely. It can provide unique functionality based on your company’s exact requirements and goals. Through the projects my company has worked on, here are some features you might want to consider when customizing your manufacturing app:
• Processing orders as they move throughout the production cycle.
• Scheduling tasks and keeping employees on track with their daily operations.
• Allocating resources to tasks and projects based on work order prioritization and worker availability.
• Tracking working hours as employees clock in and out using their smartphones.
• Managing materials with barcode scanning and location tracking for current stock levels.
• Visualizing projects on a Gantt chart to have an overview of the tasks in progress.
• Analyzing KPIs set with a user-friendly dashboard.
What you definitely don’t want is adopting technologies that will only make things harder for your employees by introducing additional steps in the workflows. When assembling customized aspects for your app, focus on streamlining your day-to-day operations. Think of solutions that you can adopt with functionality that easily integrate into your processes, enhance overall visibility and improve how the work gets done.
Connecting Every Area Of Your Manufacturing Business
Apps that bring the most value do not function in a vacuum. They should be integrated into your daily processes and impact different business operations in real time.
Therefore, ensure that your manufacturing apps are a part of the bigger picture. Mobile technologies are the most helpful when they tie into the systems and processes, working together to drive efficiency at different levels of your organization.
Some examples of the most popular operational systems I’ve seen that can help streamline workflow on all levels of your manufacturing business include:
• Enterprise resource planning
• Project management software
• Inventory management
• Computerized maintenance management system
• HR management software
With a one-size-fits-all approach to digital transformation, businesses can miss opportunities to leverage the unique conditions, culture and workflows of their sites. Again, rather than jump headfirst into deploying technological innovations, take the time to closely examine your network. Highlight those areas across the manufacturing value chain that should be prioritized first for big and quick wins and create a detailed roadmap on how you can scale technologies over time.
Your roadmap should include use cases that describe how you can accomplish particular goals with tech solutions. Make sure to take into account available data concerning your operations and performance, budget, requirements and desired goals in order to create an organization-wide technology rollout plan.
Getting The Best Out Of Digital Transformation
To capture the full potential of transformation efforts, the technologies and mobile apps you implement should fit seamlessly into your company’s workflow and integrate with your already existing systems.
Although there are a variety of solutions available on the market, I have seen firsthand how digital tools tailored precisely to business processes can deliver the most satisfactory results. If you follow my advice in implementing these customizations, I believe you can most effectively bring major improvements throughout the entire manufacturing value chain of your organization.
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