Manufacturing: From Design to Distribution Intelligently

Thanks to increasing globalisation, supply chains now stretch across numerous continents and time zones. Effective communication and collaboration between locations can make the difference between ensuring business success or a product falling at the first hurdle.

Simply having big meeting rooms and a vast video conferencing suite is not necessarily the best option in today’s mobile world. With workforces increasingly adopting mobile technology, visual communications has become a popular and effective solution to successfully manage the entire manufacturing supply chain.

Field teams can coordinate quickly and clearly. Production activities can be monitored from any location. Operations staff can liaise with R&D departments closely. Senior managers can see first-hand how facilities are functioning, without any need to travel to them.

Furthermore, other positive outcomes include:

• Strategic supply chain management – keep vital information and content flowing between manufacturing locations, employees, suppliers, vendors and customers.
• Accelerated design and development activities – enable designers to have real-time, life-like interactions with customers and suppliers, maximising their creative output and accelerating your time-to-market.
• Increased operational efficiency – identify, diagnose and repair disruptive situations virtually, improving incident response times, health and safety and reducing costly downtime in the process.

Communication is key to creating any product, though moving it beyond the brief to an item suitable for sale is highly complex, which is why effective collaboration throughout the process is necessary. Visual tools that allow designers, distributors and managers to update others in the supply chain on progress will ensure the product is delivered as envisioned and on-budget.

If video meetings are becoming the norm in the office, why shouldn’t manufacturing follow the progress and become a more visual process? That is the question every manufacturing department and firm should ask themselves.