A Fortune 100 company in the US has been expanding and ramping up its production capacities aggressively in the last few years to cater to its global demands. To complement these expansion efforts, the company invested strategically and heavily in implementing high-tech manufacturing assembly lines in its facilities. However, the organisation was not able to increase its efficiency on the production floors to the expected levels, thereby resulting in a marginal increase in productivity. Thus, was not able to achieve the expected productivity and the bottomline targeted by the top management through such huge investments. Detailing the challenge Investigation by top management revealed that though the high-tech manufacturing assembly lines were in place and functioning to their fullest potential, controlling them was a challenge. For this, the floor supervisors had to be equipped with real-time assembly line data to monitor them, take decisions and act accordingly.
In the existing scenario, the assembly line data was wired to the server rooms and the floor supervisor had to wait for the data to reach him before acting decisively, thereby reducing the process efficiency. The other practical difficulty was that the floor supervisor had to move to the server room to access the assembly line controlling software. This discovery further narrowed down the challenge and the key objective before the organisation was to enable real-time assembly line data access and key assembly line controlling features to the floor supervisors who are always on the move. The company had already invested in Blackberry devices for their employees to access their email. However, now the company decided to allow the floor supervisors to access assembly line data and assembly line controlling features from their Blackberries. The amount of technical difficulties involved in achieving the same emphasised the need for a partner who had a fair amount of expertise in mobile technology. The key technology challenges faced were mobile-enabling real-time data and features to control the assembly line, device side memory management, flexible graphical data representations, data security, development approach/ methodology to handle the application development process for catering to the evolving Blackberry models.
The solution Endeavour Software Technologies, the mobile experts, were called in and entrusted with the task of analysing, recommending and implementing a solution to address the previously mentioned technology challenges. Endeavour Software performed a detailed analysis by studying the challenges faced and recommended the following:
Business benefits
The solution once implemented, resulted in the floor supervisors accessing real-time assembly line data, monitoring them closely and making effective and timely decisions at the point of activity. The floor supervisors were also able to control certain key factors of the assembly line using their Blackberries. This resulted in an increase in production efficiency, thereby realising the bottomline targeted by the organisation through such strategic high-tech investments.
The author is a Project Manager with Endeavour Software Technologies |
