Administrative process in manufacturing

Historically, optimization efforts in manufacturing companies were focused on production processes. In general, all industries have their production processes optimized, measured, and controlled. But not every administrative process in manufacturing is optimized.

The support processes, or administrative processes, have been left aside and usually run in a suboptimal way. This implies more personnel to execute them (with the consequent increase of indirect costs). It also means that the customer, distributors, and suppliers’ service is slow. Improving these processes, by automating them with a BPM Suite, implies generating a legitimate competitive advantage for manufacturing companies.

In Flokzu, we have a large number of clients in the manufacturing sector. In most cases, the processes that have been automated have been the administrative ones. The results are very encouraging, and improvements in the efficiency of most processes have been generated. Fewer people are required to execute them. We will see below some concrete examples.

The design of new products

The design of new products is a complex administrative process in a manufacturing company, involving many steps and people from different areas, such as:

Innovation area and basically any employee, who proposes a new product.

Engineering area that analyses its viability, prototypes, and estimates costs.

The financial area that makes the corresponding analysis.

The commercial area that estimates the potential market, suggested price, etc.

Management, which reviews and approves the new product.

The marketing area defines the materials to boost sales.

etc.

This process is classified as administrative since it is not a production process, although it clearly involves almost all areas of the company and a large number of steps. We have seen real BPMN diagrams of this process with more than 100 user tasks. Of course, many of them are executed in parallel (using inclusive gateways), while others are sequential. Diagrama bpmn

The modification of existing products.

Related to the above process is the modification of existing products. This is another typical administrative process, which also requires a large number of steps, depending on the degree of modification of the product.

As with the processing of new products, it is possible to execute this process manually. In fact, many industries still do this, relying on emails and spreadsheets (such as MS Excel) to track the tasks involved. Anyone who has participated in a process under these conditions will agree that it is tedious, error-prone, and above all, very slow.

Being able to modify existing products, to meet market needs and changes in competitors is essential to remain competitive.

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