Situation

Our customer designs, manufactures and assembles metal structures. Its operations handle thousands of spare-parts, where each piece is purchased, transferred, processed and painted before it’s ready. All of those steps were documented by hand, no digital solution existed.

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Challenge

The company had no way to trace a product through its lifecycle:

• No single source of data. Information was spread across many documents, often handwritten.

• Too much time spent on paperwork. Staff spent 40% of their time preparing and checking documents.

• Costly errors. Wrong product allocation led to repeated losses from rework and overtime.

• Fragile back-up. Service levels dropped whenever a colleague had to cover for someone else.

• No overview. The data couldn’t be combined for wider analysis.

 

Solution

We designed a process and created a digital tracker, covering all spare-part life-cycle stages:

1. One global database that traces every piece (including assebled ones) through every stage.

2. Connected documents. All supporting documents draw their data from the database, so a correction made once shows up everywhere.

3. One-click document creation. Documents are generated and filed automatically, with no chance for human error.

 

Results

• Full product traceability across all lifecycle stages.

• Data ready for analysis, now that it can be combined across the different projects

• Reliable back-up. Any team member can step in without loss of service.

• Time spent on documents fell from 40% to 15%, totalling to estimated saving of 21,000 CHF per person per year, plus avoided overtime and rework.

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☑︎ Digitalization ☑︎ Data governance ☑︎ Process design ☑︎ Software deployment ☑︎ Advanced analytics