Digital transformation playbook for manufacturing

Are your IT systems and LEAN not getting you to where you need to be? The pressure on the efficiency of manufacturing has increased tremendously. Is your company also facing:

Lower order volumes from customers

Frequent machine changeovers due to volatile customer demand

Material management challenges and excess stock levels

Customers pushing for shorter fulfillment times

LEAN methodology not providing enough benefits anymore

Inflexible IT systems that cannot cope with your demand

Are you stuck with Industry 4.0?

According to a recent McKinsey study, more than 60% of companies who have initiated Industry 4.0 improvement projects were not able to create results with a sustainable business impact. The lack of a clear ROI and the application of technology without a clear focus on human workers are the major obstacles when implementing Industry 4.0 solutions at scale.

In order to reach the required level of flexibility on the shopfloor, processes need to be redesigned in a digital first way. This means converting existing procedures that have required a lot of overhead in the past into a constant flow of information in very detailed granularity. With this data at hand, you can continue into optimizing your operations in a truly digital fashion. With digital processes, you enable your employees to act fast and solve processes where they occur. At the same time you enable collaboration across cross functional teams. And this allows you to increase operational flexibility and transform the setup of your shop-floor. WORKERBASE is your partner on the journey of your digital transformation.

Read more about the
Enablers of digital transformation

4 steps to make your company stay ahead of your competitors

Overcoming current challenges requires to re-think your operational stack from the ground up. If you are still using Excel and a lot of paper in your manufacturing operations, you will have an increasingly difficult time to stay ahead of your competitors. Winning your customers’ business means: acting fast and being flexible and focus on the empowerment of your staff.

1) Digital processes
to increase productivity

Creating digital work processes with WORKERBASE can be done in a matter of minutes. You do not need any IT skills to build workflows, allowing you to directly leverage the knowledge of your frontline people to design procedures that instantly meet your needs.

2) Improve collaboration
across teams

The WORKERBASE system takes care of assigning work items to the best suited people in any situation. By letting our system coordinate your workers, you can instantly benefit from having the total workload get distributed across the whole team: freeing up highly qualified staff from mundane tasks and turning people’s idle time into productive time.

3) Continuous improvement based on real-time data

WORKERBASE’s data is unique and gives your opportunities for continuous improvements in areas that have previously been out of reach. From easily analyzing your material flow to forecasting and automatically adjusting the workload of your departments during the day.

4) Engaging
your people
in new ways

Manufacturing companies often think their workers are not well suited to handle digital tools. Quite the opposite is true, they have only been confronted with complex user interfaces on cumbersome devices for many years. WORKERBASE provides not only zero-learning curve user interfaces but also a unique way to educate your staff and drive motivation and engagement.

How to start the digital transformation in manufacturing?

WORKERBASE has been designed to be a system that allows you to customize anything you need to customize and at the same time benefit from a robust operating stack that handles your critical processes. We have lived through the same pains as many operational managers who are implementing IT systems and we have put all our learnings into our product and customer process.

Professional project management: When you set up a project with WORKERBASE we equip you with guidelines and operational documents that ensure your project managers are taking care of everything that we have ever seen being critical in an IT project.

Rapid deployment: In 99.9% of all cases, your requirements do not need any adaptations in the WORKERBASE core system. All your processes and workflows are created inside the existing system. This means whatever your are creating can directly be deployed into your test or production environment. You are getting the benefit of using our system from day one and can realize a return-on-invest in very short time.

Seamless integration: We can integrate with any of your existing systems as long as they have some kind of programming interface. Since we know that we are operating in a space that has a wide array of legacy systems (often homegrown ones as well), we have made the system connection as easy as a few mouse clicks. Even if you have a really exotic system, we can typically help you connect it in a matter of minutes.

Our playbook for the
Digital transformation

Once you have made the decision to work with us, we can get you setup to run your pilot in a matter to 2 weeks (subject to stakeholder availability on your side). In order to get started we have created a sequence of tasks that safely get you into a production deployment in the time frame agreed - guaranteed.

Scoping workshop: This can be online or face to face. The purpose of it is to clarify exactly what if required and expected on both sides. We also give you a high level indication on the architecture of your solution.

Kick-Off: Once all elements needed to start the project are completed, we ship you a first system and install a simple use case together with your team. You can then start implementing all IT related tasks on your side such as ensuring access to the system from your shop floor WiFi, setting up devices, connecting legacy systems, etc. In the meantime the WORKERBASE team takes care of implementing your first use case.

Pilot phase: In order to ensure a smooth transition into your day to day operations, we implement a pilot phase of 4-8 weeks to familiarize your workers with the system and gain data points for further optimization of your use case. If you have connected a wider range of legacy systems, we typically recommend to run this phase for 4 additional weeks to make sure the transfer of all possible kinds of data has occurred.

Production handover: Once you have completed your pilot phase, your system is ready to transform into production use. At this point we will move you to our high availability cluster and typically configure a smaller system for you in order to do some tests in a sandbox environment. On technical terms moving from pilot into production using the WORKERBASE cluster means a maximum of 5 minutes downtime for you.

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