familiar pains
Often, a company's needs are established by the recognition of what "pain" an organisation is suffering. For example, how can we reverse the trend of spending (wasting) more and more time managing information.
Employees refer to it as routine "drudgery"
Specific examples might include:
- Locating current and historical documents & drawings
- Identifying referenced documents & drawings
- Clarifying which is the latest revision
- Establishing which version and when a particular file was released to production or a third party
- Locating the standards referenced in a document or drawing
- Time distributing documents and drawings
- Time filing released documents and distribution schedules
- Responding to queries about documents and drawings from all parties, sales, marketing, production, support, etc.
- Time invested in reviewing and marking up drawings and subsequently communicating the result
- Re-entering drawing data in other forms, schedules and reports
- Time spent preparing routine status reports, printing and distributing
- Time lost as a consequence of corrupt documents or drawings
- Time to create files you know were completed by others, which cannot be found in the archives
- Time to selectively archive specific documents and drawings related to a project
- Time preparing event reports, detailing what was created, distributed to whom and when, including copies of the historical files
- Time to reconcile and duplicate "as built" information for distribution to the client or operator
- Time to establish where, within a collaboration process, a hold-up has occurred
- Time spent attending design review meetings including travel time and costs
- Time taken to prepare for quality systems audit assessment
- Time to collate the documents and standards required for an assembly instruction
- Time to create, distribute all the information required for an engineering change order, or proposed amendment/revision to existing design
- Time re-inventing the wheel, as believed to be quicker than finding the existing or established part or process
- Time to respond to customer queries requiring a call back after the appropriate information and related documents have been tracked down
As always its about time, … less of it
An endless list of where individuals and organisations spend or waste valuable time, as there is no coherent, robust solution to underpin the interactions between engineers, designers and the network of both internal and external parties attempting to deliver the product or service.
The common theme, the unifying requirement is to save time, creating better products and services customers actually want, as efficiently as possible.
