Traditionally improving productivity of value chains in the manufacturing industry has mostly been done at the factory floor. Manufacturing processes have been highly automated and methods improved continuously. At the same time, office processes for improving productivity have often been almost forgotten.
Your supplier might have the best available robotised technology to produce your components efficiently. Meanwhile, you are still struggling with trying to manage claims with them by email, typing the information that supplier has sent to you manually in your internal systems or desperately trying to find the supplier’s material certificates that your customer is asking for.
Today, a lot of time is wasted in business relations, for instance, in searching information, creating reports, waiting for someone to send you some critical information, typing the same information multiple times manually to different systems of different companies. There is a huge potential to improve the white-collar productivity of a value chain by reducing manual work and ensuring that the needed information is easily available whenever and wherever.
My colleagues and I have been solving productivity issues and helping manufacturing companies all over the world in improving productivity of their value chains. The common challenge is how to share and manage information and to collaborate between companies. The automation of information processing, fast information searching, instant collaboration, and real-time reporting in the whole value chain are typical topics in our development workshops.
When people do not need to spend time to manual routine work they can do something that really creates customer value, such as collaboration, problem-solving, learning from each other or developing new products and services with customers and suppliers. And by the way, this type of work is usually much more pleasant for employees than manual routine work.
This blog post was published originally in the Jakamo Official Blog on 3 May 2016.
