The webinar was conducted by Indrek Jaal – CEO of GlobalReader and Triin Ploompuu – Member of the Board at the Federation of Estonian Engineering Industry.

 

Webinar’s purpose was to ease the fears accompanied with production digitalisation and to give manufacturing businesses an easy 5 step digitalisation roadmap. Seminar main talk was about how the digitalisation roadmap looks like and which things should be digitised at all. Listeners also found out how to implement changes in the business processes.

 

What are the biggest fears: 

• ERP developments = digitalisation
• Who to trust?
• Budget – do I really get what I pay for?
• Focus disappears from main activity – changing habits
• Problems might arise in management and production – do we really want to acknowledge those?

Digitalisation mainly means mindset, how a company as a single entity thinks.
Digitalisation is a long-term plan and it must be taken into account – it will start to pay off in time.

 

 

Problem mapping: 

• Find the bottlenecks in the production
• Map out company fears 
• What are the problems – put problems into words. 

In order to establish a plan for digitalisation, one should first understand what the current situation is.
Answer questions, what is the problem we are going to solve. And start primarily from small steps. There is no need to invest millions to keep up with time. 

 

Start with real time machine monitoring:

Increase overview of the production.
What if production only produces on a project basis? – If it is planned to make a product in 100h, then you should make sure that it can be produced in exactly or lower than 100h. If you produce with 80h it is a net profit, if you produce with 120h you work at a loss.

 

 

Use real time data in real time:

Collect data, process it and visually view it. – As a result new management decisions are made and the company reaches a whole new level.
Also future decisions are made more easily from that point.

 

Put up screens with KPIs:

Digitalisation gives opportunity to communicate with employees. Nowadays problems cannot be solved with “whip and cookie” anymore. You have to look every employee in the eye and discuss problems – how to do better. Usually best solutions come by the people themselves.

 

 

Use collected data:

Keep an eye on the collected data every day and react according to that.
Do you use production machines enough/sufficiently, what your machines really do? Think really seriously where to invest – does it always make sense to buy an extra machine. Also keep an eye open to ensure that the machine is not over working and immediately breaking down.

 

Summary – 5 easy steps: 

• Involve the whole team when making the plan. 
• Find out what are the bottlenecks. 
• Make a long term action plan. 
• Consult with specialists. 
• Analyse gathered data constantly.