Consider Combining Business and Production Systems
Business versus Production System
Often the smallest businesses will have sophisticated “automated” IT systems for accounts, marketing, selling etc. However, step into the production areas of some manufactures, sometimes it is a different story. You could be in a different era with completely manual systems.
There are very good reasons for this:
Most business sufficiently resemble each other in business methodology so that there is wide-spread agreement on how to automate the business systems.
Hence these systems are “configured” industry standard solutions – the underlying systems are the same from business to business. However a business wanting to automate the production process, particularly to interface with the office systems needs to have a very thorough understanding of the STRUCTURE of the process data. Not easy to do.
There can be very good reasons for integrating process and office systems however:
- Paper gets lost, is tedious/hard to file, hard to use when someone has to search through shelves’ worth of files to find it.
- Manual systems often require the same data to be entered again and again.
- Manual systems tend to be interpreted differently by each person that uses them with implications for reliability and repeatability.
- It can be extremely difficult to cross-reference paper-based data for traceability.
If it is accepted this is a profitable way forward, a company needs an Road Map!
The Business / Automation Road Map
This is a plan to convert a business from a paper-based production system to an automated process system linked with the office systems.
The key concepts of this are:
- Each step is valuable in its own right. the plan can cherry-pick the most cost-effective parts early on and combine other parts with future upgrades. - There is a cost-benefit analysis made for each stage. - There is a willingness to embrace a culture whereby there is a “Business Manual”. By this it is meant that the business process is expressed in a formal manner, and there is an undertaking to express changes to the business, first in the Manual with consultation with all affected staff before implementation.
It has to be acknowledged that a fully manual business system is the most flexible way of doing business – anything can be changed at any time. This is not necessarily good thing! Things can change uncontrollably, without key staff being aware of it - repeatability and reliability can suffer.
