Identifying Workflow Improvements: An important step to ensure your shop floor digital transformation effort is successful

At ComplianceQuest, we recently published a whitepaper titled “Gearing up to restart shop floor operations? Here’s a checklist for manufacturing leaders”. In this paper, we suggested a 4-step approach to drive digital transformation of your factory operations.

The steps include the following:

1. Conducting a gap analysis
2. Identifying specific workflow improvements that are needed
3. Shop floor data integrated with the entire ERP, EQMS and EHS system that’ll drive connected automation across operations, quality and health & safety requirements
4. Continuous Improvement, taking advantage of predictive analytics and proactive measures

In this blog, we share a checklist for Step #2 that’ll help plant heads and quality leaders with identifying specific workflow improvements that are needed, so the automation solution can be customized as needed.

Best practices and workflow improvements to ensure workplace safety & supplier readiness

Once the gap analysis is done, shop floor operations will go through an upgrade. There are two aspects to this: people-related and process-related.

Let’s take supplier readiness as an example. In most cases, the pandemic has disrupted the supply chain of most enterprises. How do we qualify new suppliers? How do we reboard current suppliers? How do we take into account geographical challenges where certain parts of the supply chain are located in areas that are adversely affected by the pandemic? All these questions related to supplier readiness need to be answered. Your procurement team has to be trained to take care of new supplier onboarding or old supplier reboarding. Supplier Qualification Data must be captured in the supplier readiness system or, even better, a QHSE.

Parallelly, HR and safety leaders need to set up workplace safety and employee health processes for reopening. It is crucial to have a location-specific safety checklist, complete with hygiene guidelines, inventory of PPE equipment, and regular inspections. As a shop floor operations head, it is important that you collaborate with your safety and HR colleagues to ensure this is done.

Workplace safety begins at home; Employees need to be trained on safety guidelines that they follow not only within the office but at home, during field visits, and so on. Once the workplace safety workflow is set, it needs to be monitored for continuous improvement.

Here’s a sample checklist for Step II, which includes workplace safety, employee health and supplier readiness.

• Design your workplace safety process.
• Automate the process with ComplianceQuest’s Workplace Safety app
• Understand the disruption in your supply chain
• Automate the process of rebuilding your supply chain with ComplianceQuest’s Supplier Readiness app
• Train your people to build a culture of safety and quality
• Connect these two systems with your ERP and QHSE system

The next step in the process is to choose the cloud-based EQMS + EHS solution based on specific needs of your enterprise. It is critical to note that automation solution or SaaS software must be flexible and customization to suit your organization’s requirements.

Read this whitepaper to find out more.