Customer Profile: A leading manufacturer of packaged food products.
Problem: The client had grown organically over the last 10 to 15 years as a single person driven organization. The whole process of order management, manufacturing, and dispatch was controlled manually leading to a heavily person dependent organization and there was a need for the business owner to bring in systems to help himself disconnect from day to day operations.
Solution: We studied the entire business process flow of the organization and we brought in system driven workflows at every stage. Order management which would be captured through SMSs and WhatsApp messages were replaced by an online form which would populate a backend worksheet with all the orders which came in. Day to day production which would be managed by a single person on where the orders were copied by him from WhatsApp messages and SMSs into his diary for production planning was replaced by a commonly viewable spreadsheet, where the order entered online were now captured into a spreadsheet and the spreadsheet was used to arrive at a daily production plan. Inventory management was a non existing practice was replaced by two spreadsheets which were capturing the raw material entry and exit and the finished good entry and exit leading to the update in the billing system. Apart from the basic processes all the other processes were also brought online which is, the maintenance department also started maintaining their issues, preventive maintenance breakdowns online. The quality department started maintaining their day to day quality data online. All of this was integrated into one website, where anybody in the organization could click on the link and access the respective spreadsheet and get whatever he/she was looking for.
Benefit: In a short period of four months we were able to bring the entire organization into a systematic working environment. Processes were put in place, ad hoc decision making was replaced by system driven decision making, slippages, orders lost, miscommunication was reduced to a large extent because the data could be verified in the online sheets. This also laid the foundation for implementation of an ERP based on these processes.
Process Flow Management