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From the beginning of the process, when manufacturing companies begin conceptualizing a product, many documents are involved. Designs, plans, engineering changes, product data, and more! All these documents play a vital role in the manufacturing process, and without a proper system to help, your company can experience many complications.
Within the manufacturing industry, documents not only need to be stored properly, but they also need to be easily retrievable in real-time. A document management system (DMS) can ensure that all your documents are organized, easily retrievable, secure, and streamlined. From batch processing to post-production, the manufacturing processes can be chaotic and demanding. In this blog, we will talk about three of the top reasons manufacturing companies need a document management system and get started on our journey.
Collaboration and Communication Across Teams
No matter what industry you are in, collaboration and communication between various teams within your organization are key. Think about all the documents you and your team use on a day-to-day basis. For example, your company may have inventory reports that you run to ensure that you have the correct materials needed. Changes within the document would need to be communicated with other departments. With paper-based document management, your team would have to manually make those changes to the document and take the time to find the proper person to communicate those changes. This could lead to misplaced documents, human error, or hold up production.
A DMS can collaborate on documents while keeping the documentation process easy. With features such as document indexing, your team will be able to easily access these documents, leave any comments or edits and route them to the appropriate department. A DMS also offers revision history or some sort of audit trail. These features allow you to see any and all edits, comments, and movement of the document throughout its entire lifecycle. Features like these are great for audits as well as understanding where possible changes or mistakes were made. The processes within a manufacturing company are robust and dynamic. Changes can happen at any moment, which is why collaboration and communication are so important. You can only do so much with paper documents; you need a DMS to get the most out of our manufacturing company.
Automated Workflows
Between the warehouse and the office, manufacturers are inundated with paperwork that needs to be dealt with quickly and efficiently to maintain productivity and bring in revenue. As we said earlier, there are many documents within the manufacturing industry, each with a unique life cycle. Some life cycles may be longer and more complex than others, going through different stages and departments. If your documents are still paper-based and manual, you limit your company’s efficiency. With a DMS, you can streamline a document’s life cycle throughout the organization through automated workflows, even in multiple locations.
There are many business processes that can be easily automated using document management and workflow tools. For example, within the manufacturing industry, you may have SOPs that need to be updated and communicated throughout your entire company quickly. A DMS gives you the technology to automatically route this document to the correct departments for edits required and/or approval. To make sure no mistakes are made, you can even assign certain tasks and logic to ensure the workflow gets completed correctly. Not only does it help with interdepartmental collaboration it also gives you and your employees more time back in their workday to focus on other critical tasks.
Organization
The amount of data stored in documents within the manufacturing industry is more than any other industry. With purchase orders, quality control records, bills of materials, and many others, a document management system is critical to staying organized and ready to handle the next truck of shipments going out or coming in. Think of how you organize your documents now. If you are still using paper-based documents, you may have them in filing cabinets that take up space and add unnecessary extra cost to your company; or you may use online storage apps such as Google Drive or Dropbox. These ways of organizing your documents may seem fine for now, but if you haven’t already, you will experience issues in the long run—issues such as not finding documents promptly or misplacing documents, or having duplicate documents.
A document management system can help you organize and file your documents in a way that makes sense to your company. For example, many DMS have an indexing feature. That allows you to classify information that describes a document and allows you to easily search and find said document once it has been digitized. When executed properly, indexing not only allows you to identify your documents based on keywords, fields, etc., you can also group similar documents together based on the identifiers used. For example, Suppose you want to find a purchase order for a specific product, but you don’t want to go through all purchase orders to find the one you are looking for. In that case, you can index your documents by product, using different methods to allow for quick and easy document retrieval.
Getting Started
Now that you have a better understanding of why manufacturing companies need a document management system, what do you do now? The first step is to look into your company’s needs regarding document management. There are many different systems out there, so be sure to do your research and ask questions along the way. Here at Mindwrap, we have helped many manufacturing companies transform their document management; want to get started? Give us a call or contact us today!
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