Paperless Manufacturing Environments: Electronic Visual Aids
Your sales department receives a call from one of your top customers. Their supplier went out of business so they need to replace a component of the part you manufacture with a different supplier's part. Not only do you need to adjust your manufacturing drawings to specify the new part, but the new component is different. Your production line needs to be shut down, and the new information needs to be disseminated from sales to engineering to the manufacturing manager to the line supervisor to the assembly team to the shipping department... ugh... Your entire company is scrambling to inform all levels of employees to stop the production lines, stop the assembly lines, and collect all old manufacturing drawings within all departments. Now, you have an entire manufacturing facility standing idle waiting for direction.
It Doesn't have to be this way!
What if your company practiced lean manufacturing principles utilizing a paperless manufacturing environment? The stop order would be immediately disseminated to all employees with the click of a button. Production, assembly, and shipping would stop, all without the need of an employee scrambling around or worse standing on the table shouting "Stop the Presses" or crimping machines or CNC machines, etc. The work order can be immediately cleared from work spaces and a new order can promptly begin. And what about those now obsolete drawings? They immediately disappear, because they were on a computer monitor and not a hard copy floating around the production environment or stuffed in someone's drawer...
The paperless manufacturing facility offers a system of monitors that are easily viewable at each work station. The screens can be adjusted to show particular drawings in the production plan. Each step in the plan can be displayed at individual work stations, so as the product is moving through the assembly line the plans are already available to the nest assembler.
Download this infographic for the Top Benefits of Going Paperless:
In a job shop environment with a high product mix with low volumes, the ability to have the most adaptable workstations possible is a requirement. Creating an enhanced, efficient work environment increases productivity, profitability, and creates less stress resulting in happier employees. And let's not forget the happy customers whose products are delivered accurately, on-time and with high quality.
iCONN Systems Paperless Manufacturing Systems
iCONN Systems utilizes a lean manufacturing perspective to ensure all of our processes are streamlined and waste is eliminated. Visit our Operations Department page to see additional lean programs iCONN Systems has implement to ensure we follow our Quality policy of:
"High Quality, On-Time Delivery, Continuous Improvement"
Check out these related Lean Manufacturing Blog Posts:
- The Backbone of iCONN Systems: Intuitive ERP Software
- Interconnect: Our Products, Our Communication, How iCONN Uses Basecamp
- 5S: The Lean, Clean, Manufacturing Machine
