CEO of Apikoan all-round software engineering and digital transformation consultancy that digitizes businesses around the world.
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By integrating technology into different parts of your business, you can reimagine your workflows with new capabilities and innovative models. It can also provide unprecedented transparency between previously isolated data.
As they embark on a digital transformation, there are two core areas that manufacturing companies should keep at the center of their efforts: achieving greater flexibility and portability. In my experience, using operational systems in conjunction with mobile apps can help you create a truly connected digital workflow to achieve both goals.
Strategic digital transformation
Strategic digital transformation can fundamentally change the way you work and deliver value, namely:
• Enabling real-time data tracking and collection across your organization.
• Streamline workflows by optimizing and automating routine manual tasks.
• Connecting teams, data, assets and processes throughout the supply chain.
• Realize a faster time-to-market by introducing more flexible business processes.
According to McKinseySuccessfully implementing digital tools and technologies can lead to a 10% to 30% increase in throughput, a 15% to 30% improvement in employee productivity, and up to 85% more accurate forecasting.
The role of mobile app production
Since certain production activities are often performed outside the office, managing them can be complicated. Mobile apps, on the other hand, make it possible to manage production operations on the go. They connect teams and collect data from anywhere within an organization or in the field. With real-time analytics, you can gain valuable insights into how your teams are performing and analyze their productivity.
Boost manufacturing productivity
If you’re looking at these kinds of manufacturing apps, look for one that helps you introduce transparency and accountability to all activities, projects, and tasks and can avoid inefficiencies during production.
With real-time and remote access to all data, you can track where your employees are, how much time each employee spends on different tasks, and how many tasks they complete in a day. This can streamline not only productivity, but also billing and scheduling for the week.
However, for best results, consider combining your time management app with project management functionality. Using boards, lists, file sharing, and calendars, along with time tracking, can help you better prioritize and organize your activities on projects, optimize workflows, and uncover more opportunities for time and cost savings.
Streamline production automation
While every organization’s needs are different, so are 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 end up in a place where you don’t have a clear understanding of how to achieve your desired ROI.
Custom software has the advantage of more accurately meeting production needs. 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 production app:
• Process orders as they move through the production cycle.
• Plan tasks and keep employees on schedule with their daily activities.
• Allocate resources to tasks and projects based on work order prioritization and employee availability.
• Keep track of working hours as employees clock in and out with their smartphones.
• Material management with barcode scanning and location tracking for current stock levels.
• Visualize projects on a Gantt chart to have an overview of the tasks in progress.
• Analyzing set KPIs with a user-friendly dashboard.
What you definitely don’t want is adopting technologies that only make things more difficult for your employees by introducing extra steps in the workflows. When building custom aspects for your app, focus on streamlining your day-to-day operations. Think of solutions you can use with functionality that integrates easily into your processes, improves overall visibility and improves the way work gets done.
Connecting every part of your manufacturing business
Apps that deliver the most value don’t function in a vacuum. They need to be integrated into your day-to-day processes and impact different business activities in real time.
So make sure your production apps are part of the bigger picture. Mobile technologies are most useful when they align with systems and processes and work 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 at all levels of your manufacturing company include:
• Enterprise Resource Planning
• Project management software
• Inventory management
• Automated maintenance management system
• HR management software
With a one-size-fits-all approach to digital transformation, companies can miss opportunities to leverage their sites’ unique circumstances, culture, and workflows. Again, take the time to examine your network closely rather than deploying technological innovations right away. Highlight those areas of the manufacturing value chain that need to be prioritized for big and fast wins and create a detailed roadmap on how to scale technologies over time.
Your roadmap should include use cases that describe how you can achieve certain goals with technical solutions. Be sure to consider available data about your operations and performance, budget, requirements, and desired goals to create an organization-wide technology rollout plan.
Make the most of digital transformation
To unlock the full potential of transformation efforts, the technologies and mobile apps you deploy must fit seamlessly into your company’s workflow and integrate with your pre-existing systems.
While there are several solutions on the market, I’ve seen firsthand how digital tools that are precisely tailored to business processes can deliver the most satisfying results. If you follow my advice in implementing these adjustments, I believe you can most effectively make major improvements throughout your organization’s manufacturing value chain.
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