Mobile devices are everywhere these days— so why aren’t they on your plant floor? Think how powerful it would be to have full process visibility independent of your location, always at your fingertips. Your routine could look completely different – no more fuss with Excel, no more wasting paper. The same devices you’re already familiar with provide quick access to data, unparalleled flexibility, helping you get faster and better in their decision-making. Leveraging the power of IoT devices can transform your factory, increasing production and ensuring a quality product.
How does enhanced mobility bring true transformation to your plant floor? Let’s zoom in on this topic and see how it can impact your day-to-day.
Operators on the plant floor leveraging mobile devices can document procedures and capture operational data instantly, wherever they are. The portability, of course, is an enormous advantage. Despite this, someone who’s used to recording activities on paper and adding them to Excel may still wonder why they should consider the change. In hectic times too, people are more inclined to do as they did before, turning blind for improvement opportunities.
The traditional way of collecting and retrieving information is time-consuming, sluggish, and prone to error. And, if you’re using pen and paper to later transfer this data to your computer, you are actually doing double work.
Mobile devices allow you to drastically reduce time, eliminate double work, and minimize the risk of error. Digital documentation, too, significantly reduces the literal paper trail that complicates efficiency on the plant floor and often leads to lost productivity.
With mobile devices in play, you can gather concise measurements throughout the production cycle. When this data is stored, analyzed, and shared via a quality management system, you can spot variations more quickly, ensuring that every product conforms. You can learn from your data, set up alarms that warn of any deviations, spot trends and make more effective predictions over the long span of the production cycle.
In contrast to comparing measurements manually with specifications on a separate sheet, a smart QMS system gives operators full control, allowing them to focus on improvement rather than operational activities.
While mobile devices empower the operators and supervisors, this data extends beyond the plant floor as well. An integrated quality management system unifies all data culled on the plant floor and then allows you to, for example, quickly and easily generate certificates of analysis for customers, confirming product quality. The cleanliness and efficiency of the data gathered on the plant floor, therefore, translates into better and more consistent customer service in the long run. What’s more, there will be agreement across your organization, eliminating siloed or messy data that can create confusion both in production and further down the line.
With the low cost of today’s mobile technology, you are not looking at a significant upfront investment to make this happen, either; given how familiar mobile technology is nowadays, you won’t have to worry about a steep learning curve as you onboard operators to this ‘new way’ of doing things. With little effort, you will achieve greater transparency across the plant floor, better planning, and control, along with quantifiable risk reduction.
While technological change is accelerating, the capacity to absorb this change becomes a bottleneck for many manufacturers. No-code Quality Management Software helps to eliminate this bottleneck.
Learn how no-code quality management can benefit your business.