Efficient organization of manual work requires timely provisioning of accurate information and work standards as well as flexible coordination of tasks.
Although many companies have already implemented IT solutions for the shopfloor, in many cases work organization still includes paper-based workflows where all tasks are assigned on paper and e.g. work standards or assembly instructions get distributed as paper.
As the required information is subject to constant change due to e.g. changing customer requirements or modified equipment, the production documents become outdated. Work standards must be revised.
In many factories today, jobs are planned on a fixed schedule determined by a work plan dervied from a planning system. This has the effect of work standards and plans being rather static and work schedule being determined by planners observing work with a stopwatch. The processing time of orders can be lowered by overlapping production or splitting into subtasks. This can be organized in processing parts of a batch at separate workstations or processing sub-batches in parallel before completing the final batch. Such approaches require flexible control and logistic workflows as each handover in a process between workers and work steps ultimately creates waiting times and inefficiencies.
The WORKERBASE platform allows the digitization of paper-based workflows with efficient provision of work instructions via mobile devices. Digital workflows on tablets and smartwatches include digital work instructions as step-by-step instructions. Digital work instructions can also leverage flexible task assignment and notifications as well as real-time visualization of current production status on digital kanban boards. Work standards can easily be transformed into digital work instructions.
WORKERBASE allows to increase the productivity level by moving task assignments to digital work instructions. This allows the optimization of individual processes as well as the overall process flow. The processing time of orders can be lowered by overlapping or splitting work into subtasks.
The WORKERBASE platform allows for simple workflow amendment as well as continuous improvement. The flexible coordination capabilities of jobs and workers allow to dynamically allocate jobs and optimize the flow of work and handovers. Businesses get a much clearer picture of the actual work being done and process flows are better coordinated. This is especially relevant where processes have dependencies (e.g. welder and quality control) or scarce resources are being used.
Our commissioning system supports task parallelization out of the box. If you would like to evaluate how your workflows can be digitally delinearized, then please get in touch with us.