Did you know that every person at your company can benefit from using the Proficy Software you’ve already invested in? Not just operations, quality, and maintenance, but also: Supply Chain – For decades, companies have optimized their supply chain by reducing the number of places they buy materials. This allowed manufacturers to make commitments to strategic suppliers, while putting service level demands on those suppliers, such as stringent quality specs, just-in-time delivery, and volume discounts. This helped make the supply chain efficient. During the Covid-19 pandemic, labor shortages and mandatory shutdowns made it impossible for some of those suppliers to keep their commitments. Today, supply chain diversity is top of mind with manufacturers. They now seek relationships with multiple suppliers. When you use the information Plant Applications can provide to analyze how your process is impacted by material variation and quality, you can see clearly when you win or lose with various suppliers. You can also reimagine the flow of material in your manufacturing process, and react to change quickly. Plant Applications can play a vital role in understanding where supply chain has impacted your manufacturing performance. Finance – Knowing how well people and equipment are performing is helpful when deciding how capital should be spent. Capital expenditures for manufacturers include acquiring, maintaining, and improving fixed assets such as buildings, equipment, and technology. Plant Applications can help you look at how energy is consumed and if more capital should be spent of energy efficient equipment. For example, you can use it to see how well building temperatures and air quality are maintained to decide if new HVAC systems should be purchased. You can use Plant Applications to see if people or equipment could do more to improve productivity, or if it would be worth investing in a plant expansion to gain manufacturing capacity. Plant Apps can also help you measure the true cost of making your products to determine if you are selling your products at the right margins. Sales and marketing – Plant performance data can be used to show new potential customers how you keep your promise to deliver quality products fast. When customers call with a special request or to inquire about order status, sales people can use plant apps to see where that customer’s order is and when it will be done, without having to walk to the floor to ask. To attract new customers, your marketing team uses regulatory and quality certifications (i.e. ANSI, ISO, QS9000 etc.) as proof points that you are a world class manufacturer. Plant apps can make it easier to prepare for a quality audit, greatly reducing the strain often put on companies during audit preparations. Human Resources – It can be difficult to keep qualified workers, it makes sense to standardize work processes so that you can increase the number of qualified candidates available each job on the plant floor. Automation of tasks with easy to access and clearly defined work instructions makes it simpler for a wider variety of people to perform the work. When you clarify what is required of workers, you create a less frustrating work environment. Gathering performance data and displaying it to front line workers:
Plant Applications is also a great platform for you to empower workers to give real time feedback about what is going on in the plant. The increased communication between operators and their support teams (i.e. supervisors and maintenance personnel) has been proven to significantly impact the overall productivity of a plant. You can use Proficy to significantly speed up communications from equipment to the operators too. This gives users a better chance to make intelligent and impactful decisions when things change on the shop floor. Why waste significant time and money evaluating and selecting a new software package when you could just use what you already have more efficiently? If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the thought of digging into what Plant apps can do for you, don’t. You’re not in this alone. Rain Engineering can help. We’re here to help you identify areas of your manufacturing world where you can take better advantage of the features and functions already built into Plant Applications. It is easy to get started.
Ready to spend less time worrying about how to digitize your process and more time getting work done?
Call Rain Engineering today. |