Single source entry of information is critical to achieve maximum efficiency. Too often I see people entering the exact same data multiple times then wonder why the wrong parts are ordered, issued or shipped. If you’re touching any piece of data more than once then that’s re-work and any “re” word is a waste of time. Let’s look at a simple process of creating a bill of material (BOM). Engineering and drafting create a drawing and reference the components on the drawing. Typically a parts “list” is given to purchasing who then dutifully keypunches those parts into their inventory system. Then they create the BOM and assign appropriate labor routings provided by manufacturing engineering. The world comes undone when the transition from characters on a drawing to keypunching yields one little transposition of one little character and BAM! We just purchased one hundred control units instead of one hundred hex head nuts.
Driving information back to its source and only touching it once means you really do need less people doing mundane tasks … put them to work building products, providing customer service or finding new customers. We all know accounting is the official score keeper. They do a fabulous job, but technology today can do a really quick and accurate accounting of everyday score keeping. Let’s look at labor entry. Sometimes we just expense off employees valuable time as “indirect” time, not really keeping score on those activities. What if we created a series of work orders and every activity was recorded via a scan of a QR code. AND, all the employee had to do was click a button at start and click a button at end. Then we let the computer analyze and chart out those postings and we see where we can re-direct those “indirects” to value adding activities.