Why Process Automation would be the new key to survive unwanted and unpredicted Epidemic ?
We all would agree that this pandemic has taught us new ways to live life. However, the impact of the same could never be overcome even in the future. People would definitely adopt or would have accustomed to live with it but what about business. The way we are modifying our life to adjust to the unwanted situation, we would need our business to go into the transformation too. But what process would help businesses to sail the ship in this pandemic or again come back in the normal state?
Definitely, old-school processes and methods would not apply/suffice here to deal with the situation. As the problem is fundamentally new, the process and method have to be ultra-modern to run a tight ship.
How about having an automated digital approach for business and operation processes to make things go smoothly and give complete control of the situation. If the business and operation processes are automated and digitalized then physical interaction would be lesser and overseeing would be much easier. Let me give you some examples here to justify my thoughts, as the same Technohertz has implemented in various organizations and automated their business and operations.
Every manufacturing company is reliable on its vendor as the vendor provides raw materials, semi-finished products or components, and many more. The company is responsible to perform pre-checks/audits before that material is picked up from the vendor location for the next set of actions. Companies use physical inspections/audits to check the quality of the ready material. Sometimes it takes a lot of time and effort to execute such inspections along with a lot of paperwork. There is a huge list of stakeholders who get involved in this end-to-end process and that’s why this process becomes more time-consuming and tedious. The execution involves a huge amount of communications, approvals, follow-ups, paperwork, back and forth between stakeholders, and the major portion of tasks fall under the team who physically visits and perform inspection/audit. Definitely, the current situation doesn’t allow the physical inspection to take place, or even in the near future it would be hard.
We at Technohertz have designed and developed a solution that would automate the complete inspection process in pandemic or post-pandemic. Think of a system (Web and Mobile based) developed with the combination of machine learning, IoT, and AI to overcome all the apertures and inadequacies currently there even with best practices. When the material is ready Vendor would raise a call in the system using PO code. This PO code would be linked to the company’s SAP/ERP system to validate the PO line such as material details, quantity and so. The buyer of the company would get notification of the call raised and validated by the system itself. The buyer could define the inspection completion date and update the call. Then this call would be sent to the Quality Assurance team automatically as per defined roles, product type, and inspection location. QA team would review the call details and make modifications if needed. Once the call is accepted by the QA team, in the next second either the call would be assigned to the internal inspection team or third party inspection team based on the details of the product, inspection location, inspection type, and many more defined protocols. If the physical inspection can happen then the inspector would visit and record all observations in a mobile app which would be synced with the server for the live update to the QA team and other stakeholders. If the inspection has to be performed virtually then the inspector would raise a virtual inspection call and the vendor would be involved to assist here. The vendor would present a material, machine, or product on a call where machine learning and Artificial Intelligence would be used to identify if the material is ready as per given specification or design guidelines. The inspector would be highlighted the areas where a detailed inspection is needed and then the inspector would drill down to those areas to identify what is inadequate.
In some of the cases, if the machine of the vendor could be connected to the cloud using IoT, the production details data could be pulled out to compare what has been produced, what was required and where is the gap. In such scenarios, vendor’s machines would have PLC or other communication mediums to transfer the production line records to the cloud and then using machine learning and artificial intelligence, given design guidelines, product specifications, product matrix and quality measures could be compared to what we have as a finished output. Even we could be more comprehensive here and could rectify how the production planning was done and where the things went wrong so that those apertures could be avoided in the future and machine could promptly call out if things are going wrong or just put the lid on in some critical cases.
This kind of futuristic solution could transform businesses and get them one step ahead in such unpredicted pandemic situations impacting businesses.
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