Manufacturing process management is a term that’s gaining traction in today’s competitive market space. After all, automation, optimised internal processes, enhanced communication, and secure data management are now necessities due to industrial modernisation and the shift to intelligent manufacturing processes.
The use of software in manufacturing began as a strategy to gain a competitive advantage. Still, in today’s fast-paced tech environment, businesses have discovered that more than internally developed software is needed for growing the company and earning revenues.
More than ever, employees value a flexible work environment, remote access, and real-time communication, and Microsoft SharePoint offers these advantages and solutions for industrial processes.
The manufacturing sector faces unique challenges related to improved team collaboration, workload management, and productivity enhancement, and SharePoint is the proactive answer to meet these business challenges.
Manufacturing Process Management with SharePoint
You must have heard about how technology can transform businesses. SharePoint is an innovative solution. It is not surprising that manufacturers are developing SharePoint collaboration systems that can boost output across all business units.
Can you imagine companies like Apple or DHL using paper for all transactions and relying on emails for their communication requirements? No right? As businesses evolve, so does the way they do their business. And SharePoint is one platform that can help manufacturers take their business to the next level by significantly optimising their manufacturing process automation.
Let’s understand how.
1. Business Process Automation
Manufacturing process automation is now viable for businesses thanks to SharePoint. With Power Automate and Microsoft Power Apps, SharePoint can remove manual handling, tracking, and handoffs in production thanks to its integrated workflow features. By digitising and automating workflows, manufacturers can also track, monitor, and check the status of every activity in real-time. Instant task completion is now possible using Business Process Automation and RPA (Robotic Process Automation). And that’s not it. Manufacturers and the workforce can respond quickly to suspicious or hazardous actions thanks to automated notifications and alerts.
2. Paperless Document Management
With SharePoint implementation, managing contract information, policies, and orders are pretty simple. Thanks to Sharepoint, businesses have done away with tedious paperwork. Manufacturers securely preserve customer/vendor contracts, documentation, and product histories. Companies can develop document management capabilities by fusing SharePoint with their internal or external CRM and ERP systems to achieve manufacturing process automation.
3. Centralised Collaboration Platform
Stakeholders of the company must frequently work together and communicate regarding various business processes that include design, production, and quality. Barriers in communication can cause minor and significant errors that can jeopardise the company in the long run.
To facilitate team collaboration and publish content for secured cooperation between internal and external stakeholders, many manufacturing companies worldwide rely on SharePoint. With SharePoint, manufacturers have a centralised platform for collaboration where project participants can hold online meetings from any location using any device. A centralised empowers the employees to work together at any time and communicate effortlessly from different parts of the world.
4. Product Lifecycle Management (PLM)
Manufacturers can rely on SharePoint to speed up innovation, solve issues, and make decisions regarding product lifecycle management. SharePoint enables various teams to reduce wait times when receiving and gathering information from their extended groups. Based on their permission level, teams can look up information and documents on their own, doing away with the need for time-consuming information requests. From the project’s inception through its various stages of work-in-progress and completion, teams can communicate and share information in real-time while adding comments as needed. This manufacturing process automation greatly expedites the turnaround time and improves the efficiency of the employees.
5. Improve Mobility Features
SharePoint enables on-the-go collaboration and communication for employees working on-site and remotely. To facilitate the availability and accessibility of data anytime, anywhere, with the help of various devices, manufacturers are equipping their sales employees with SharePoint mobility solutions. Empowering the sales team with sales templates, product information, KPIs, demos, etc., can help them accomplish various tasks and meet business objectives.
6. Web Portals, Sites, and Applications
Businesses can use SharePoint to develop portals, webpages, and applications based on the project requirements. Companies understand that with a suitable channel for communication with their trading partners, they will be able to reap the benefits of their labour. Thanks to its various tools, SharePoint can help businesses with contract management development and make it easier to communicate and share contracts, papers, and orders with vendors seamlessly.
7. Additional Benefits
A SharePoint-based system can provide additional benefits to the company, such as:
- Enforces the use of established procedures for all incidents. Strict adherence to SOPs is typical in automated workflows, where it is essential to complete specific steps before moving on to the next.
- Checks and reviews to see whether a particular incident is recurring so that staff can look into why earlier corrective measures failed to address the issue.
- Search capability to retrieve details from a central database for, e.g., forklift-related incidents in the past four years.
- The same information is accessible to all users across the organisation. Users no longer need to get in touch with the teams and various departments to inquire about the status or find out why they need to complete a particular task.
- Enables traceability and transparency for all actions. Make traceability and clarity easier by providing access to historical information about who entered specific data or gave their approval quickly without combing paper archives.
Conclusion
We understand that manufacturers face difficulties with production because it necessitates drawn-out and time-consuming form approvals. Over two decades, we have built many SharePoint solutions and custom workflows to enhance the manufacturing process automation of our client’s businesses, which enabled them to save significant time, money and resources.
If you’re a manufacturer looking to automate your business processes, switching to SharePoint is the way to go. All you need to do is reach out to us. Our in-house experts will assist you in quickly deploying a SharePoint solution with minimal interruption to your business operations.
