Killing The "Ghost Jobs" Legend In Manufacturing

Wow ! Let this quote from the article sink in.

"A recent Quickbase productivity survey of manufacturing workers in the U.S. and U.K. found that **58% are spending fewer than 20 hours a week** on meaningful work. The remaining 20 or more hours are devoted to “gray work” — chasing information from multiple systems and various teams throughout the company, and burdened by technology and processes that just don’t deliver."

Manufacturers should consider an end-to-end as-is process mapping exercise for "office" processes. Such an effort easily shows up all the places where your teams have to work outside the system, use multiple systems, or are working entirely manually. These would include transfer of engineering data to production, sales order management, planning, purchasing, and so on through to fulfilment. A great place to find multiple silos comes when mapping human resources management, time and attendance, job charging and payroll !

We have found the BPMN2.0 framework very useful for this type of process map. Our team likes to supplement the map with icons of the system(s) involved in each task. This visualization really makes the areas to improve pop out.

It's interesting how many organizations have had ERP applications "live" for a decade, or more, but are still performing extensive work in side systems. The most popular side system being MS-Excel !

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