Digital Shop Floor Management
Archimedes, Leonardo, Galileo, Liebig, Bell, Benz, Edison – in the West, people like to tell the history of technological progress as the story of individual geniuses and their brilliant inventions. However, anyone who reads deeper into the history of humanity soon realizes that this isn’t the way things work. Cooperation is the mother of progress. People are made to work together. Even the construction of Noah’s ark required teamwork, as the safe landing of the rover Perseverance on Mars in February 2021 certainly did. As does everyday work in production.
The history of productive cooperation is also the history of technologies that people use to successfully organize collaboration. The people who built the Tower of Babel were successful as long as they had a common language. So, it’s no wonder that not just the construction of towers was invented in ancient Mesopotamia,but also writing and numbers. For people who record experiences and procedures and can pass these along have a clear advantage when it comes to planning and executing complex processes.
ValueStreamer lifts classic Shop Floor Management to an entirely new level of collaboration: global, across teams and and business sectors, always up-to-date, and without friction losses.
Fast forward to the 21st century
Clay tablets have been “out” as a process management tool for more than 2,000 years; instead, Shop Floor Management, whether for the construction of Cologne Cathedral or the assembly of electric vehicles, has been done using paper. And this has been extremely successful. But currently things are changing a lot in the environment in which Shop Floor Management systems operate; on the one hand, the individual shop floors are incorporated much more closely into cross-functional and globally operative organiza tional structures. For somewhere in the Swabian Alb, Germany, a chipping machine has broken down, and this has direct effects on the final production of a car in Slovakia. On the other hand, today many processes at a company are digital – from process planning to controlling and accounting. The interface between paper-based Shop Floor Management systems and digital management systems such as ERP and MES is usually the email account of the person responsible for the process, and perhaps also a confusing Excel file. For comprehensive planning, control, and management processes at companies, the valuable data and information that has already been produced is thus as good as lost.
Collaborate worldwide: cross-functional and problem-oriented
Or people try to use one of the numerous planning and collaboration tools on the market to cobble together a Shop Floor Management system. Usually there, you’re fighting with a similar problem as with email: disorganized, difficult-to-search floods of data that are stored in countless app accounts and on end user devices so that they are not universally accessible. You can’t really blame the tools used: classic paper-based Shop Floor Management systems are optimized for planning and controlling flows and processes in production and registering deviations from planned flows and transferring these into structured problem-solving. All of this with a high degree of agility and spontaneity that arises from the teamoriented leadership philosophy of this management approach. Mapping this in “normal” digital collaboration or visualization solutions isn’t that easy.
Identify and solve problems more quickly
This is where ValueStreamer’s digital Shop Floor Management begins: everything that has previously been recorded and documented in analog fashion is recorded digitally – and can therefore be searched and analyzed. But this web-based software solution can do still more: thanks to digitalization, the individual shop floors can be networked with one another, even across different locations, and incorporated into the usual global ERP and management systems. This way, the data and information that they need to control the productivity and quality of their processes is available directly to the people responsible for the line. The software also represents the single point of truth for all participants. Globally distributed teams and teams working across disciplines can also collaborate in real time without a loss of information and without unstructured floods of emails and messages. The training phase for digital Shop Floor Management is short, even for newbies. The user interfaces are optimized for intuitive use. Depending on their defined role, each team member has access to precisely the processes and data that they need in order to perform tasks independently.
DIGITAL SHOP FLOOR MANAGEMENT
enables the availability of data from all boards of the
entire, global corporate cascade.
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Further Content
Companies give their managers a poor report card/Significant need to improve analytical and communication skills – “Collaboration – The key to success” study
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Every second meeting ends with no results or is superfluous / Only one in three companies successfully implements digital process management – “Collaboration – The key to success” study
In connection with the Corona pandemic, people like to talk about an increase in digitization among companies. But managers and employees still suffer from a flood of emails and inconclusive and superfluous meetings. This can be remedied by digital process management, which prepares information clearly and transparently and brings it to where it is needed. For the “Collaboration – The key to success” study, management consultancy Staufen together with the experts from Staufen.Valuestreamer surveyed more than 300 companies in Germany.
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