A new era of automation in manufacturing: no-code process automation

Anna00:03

Hello and welcome back to All Access: Manufacturing. In this webinar, we'll discuss how manufacturing organizations can accelerate innovation and comply with ease with no-code process automation. I'm delighted to introduce our speaker, Paul Stone from FlowForma. Paul, over to you.

Paul Stone00:33

Thanks very much for the intro, Anna. Today I'm looking forward to talking about how business process automation can make a significant difference to manufacturing operations, and to sharing some of the case studies and use cases where it's made a real difference to significant manufacturing companies.

Paul Stone00:51

To kick off, let's talk about how process automation is a strategic imperative. A recent Forrester report focuses on making change, becoming resilient and managing that change, and doing that through standardized business processes.

Paul Stone01:15

When we talk about automation in manufacturing, we're often talking about automating the manufacturing process itself. But you need to keep a focus on the people in your organization, because it's the people who enable that change to happen, and who make your company more resilient and more competitive in the marketplace.

Paul Stone01:34

So look at the way your people perform their processes, and try to make them more productive, reduce waste and do things more predictably. As the environment around you changes, whether that's your competitive landscape or disruption in your supply chain, digitized processes make your operations more predictable and help you control the risk of change outside your organization.

Paul Stone02:10

Some of the challenges you may face: you may serve multiple locations or have multiple divisions, and getting people to work across departments and divisions is very difficult if you rely on email chains and spreadsheet trackers to manage their activities.

Paul Stone02:34

It can also be very difficult right now to hire and retain skilled employees. In many markets, recruiting new people into the organization is a real challenge.

Paul Stone02:44

Then there's finding and maintaining your competitive edge, by making sure your products are developed to meet market needs. And you might be challenged by poor reporting and a lack of visibility of where things are at any point in time.

Paul Stone03:13

What we'd like to do now is launch an interactive poll, where you can let us know which challenges you see in your organization right now. Anna, it would be great if you could launch that poll.

Paul Stone03:50

It's really interesting to see that we have a clear winner: business process visibility. It's very common across all organizations, not just in manufacturing. Process visibility is a real challenge because people aren't collecting details about the business processes in their organization.

Paul Stone04:13

Without collecting that vital data, it's impossible to display in a dashboard where things are right now. That was significant for many of our clients: by enabling process visibility, they saw a really significant improvement in their productivity. We'll be talking about that in a little while.

Paul Stone04:48

In many organizations, digitizing processes is very much top-down. Processes are digitized by the IT department, and the workers in the field are told: this is the new process, please follow it. The alternative is to have your business people define those processes themselves.

Paul Stone05:13

Business people know those processes better than anybody else, and you can enable them to digitize them. It encourages ownership of the solution in the business, and it encourages the people who carry out a process to digitize it the way they need to work. The steps in a process can then be tracked and refined over time, so your operations run as efficiently as possible.

Paul Stone05:53

With FlowForma, processes can be digitized very rapidly. It's designed as a no-code tool, so people can produce digital solutions very quickly, roll them out to end users in the field, get feedback and refine them. Typically, we see a return on investment with FlowForma within six weeks.

Paul Stone06:23

We support mobile apps, so people can use it wherever they are: in head office, in the field, in one country or the next. Processes run across departments, countries and sites, so everyone involved can access the system when they need to. And because you're tracking every process, you know where things are at any point in time.

Paul Stone07:05

Let's look at some real-world case studies. The first is Nipro Europe, a large medical devices manufacturer. They implemented FlowForma to deal with changes that were simply too expensive to build using traditional methods.

Paul Stone07:26

They outsource most of their IT, and they run some very large systems, SAP for example. Implementing a solution for, say, a small warehouse was expensive: they'd have to engage a third-party vendor and extend what they were doing in SAP. So they wanted a way to digitize quickly, at minimal expense, without relying on IT resources, which they had outsourced.

Paul Stone08:08

They deployed FlowForma and championed it as a solution used entirely by the business. They saw it as a transformational tool: an opportunity for the business to express its needs by producing digital solutions themselves. It also let them standardize processes, so someone in head office in Belgium could build a solution used anywhere in the Nipro Europe business. I think they had over 90 locations.

Paul Stone08:48

Those digital processes also drive communication between everyone involved, including external suppliers and clients. So the system doesn't just track the process; it drives it forward and keeps all the necessary parties moving, which made them noticeably more productive.

Paul Stone09:17

Another key example is a drinks manufacturing company, a global leader in the production of alcoholic beverages, exporting to over 130 markets worldwide. They had a lot of unstructured processes in place, and the one I'd like to talk about is product development.

Paul Stone09:40

This company had to push 300 products through an innovation process every year to meet its growth targets. They'd have 300 ideas and concepts to evaluate and pass through a stage-gate process, to get a small percentage of them into production and launched. Once a product launched, it generated sales and fueled growth, so it was a key process.

Paul Stone10:18

It involved multiple approval steps: products were ideated, in other words designed and specified, then assessed for feasibility. If they were judged feasible, they were placed into a launch plan and launched onto the market. Each of those three stages was very complex.

Paul Stone10:39

The solution was built very quickly, and it reduced the product launch cycle from six months to six to eight weeks. That had a massive positive impact, because they could launch products faster, and those products were well tested, so they hit their sales targets and fueled growth.

Paul Stone11:12

They also saw FlowForma as very cost effective. Previously, they'd looked at expensive, large packaged solutions that didn't quite meet their requirements. FlowForma was much cheaper, both to buy and to operate, and it could be used and modified by the business people themselves.

Paul Stone11:43

A little about FlowForma, the product and the company. We're based in Dublin, Ireland, with offices in the US and the UK. We're an award-winning business process automation provider with over 200,000 users across 20 countries.

Paul Stone12:04

We're dedicated to empowering business people to work smarter and faster: to create their own digital solutions and roll them out to co-workers and to people inside and outside the organization. We're recognized by Forrester, we're a Microsoft Gold Partner, and we have very high scores on platforms like G2, so do go to our website and look at those reviews.

Paul Stone12:47

We don't have time today for a full demonstration, but these two screenshots give you a good idea of how the system works. On the right, you're seeing an employee onboarding process in action. Along the top is a series of business process steps, showing where you are. Right now I'm at the start, on my starter checklist, and as the process progresses I'll move through the remaining steps.

Paul Stone13:29

Each step is a task carried out by a person. As they carry out the task, they record details in the bottom part of the screen; here they're capturing details about the employee. Each step is assigned to a specific person, and as you move through the steps, a full audit trail is retained of how the process progressed and what was captured at each step.

Paul Stone14:11

Every process in FlowForma has a similar interface, whether it's onboarding, incident management or a change request. The end user knows exactly where they are, what happened in the past and what's going to happen next. Behind that simple interface is a big, complex workflow engine, which we can show you in a demo.

Paul Stone14:50

All the information captured in every process is stored centrally and available in a dashboard. There's a simple dashboard on the left, and we can show you more complex reporting and dashboards in a full demo.

Paul Stone15:10

Our users digitize a wide range of processes. FlowForma is a generic system designed to digitize any business process, so whatever process challenges you have right now, you can build a solution with a no-code tool. Incident management is extremely popular among our clients. We also have people building solutions for supply chain management, fleet maintenance, asset management and innovation management.

Paul Stone15:51

Stock management is a very popular one in manufacturing. Nipro built a basic stock management system for a small warehouse, when the alternative would have been to deploy an SAP warehousing module at great expense. You can often build solutions in FlowForma that fill gaps in your current applications, or replace the need to buy a big, complex application that's overkill for the problem. Build a small one, deploy it quickly and start getting a return on investment immediately.

Paul Stone16:34

The timelines for process automation are relatively short, especially compared with a packaged implementation like SAP. We're talking about six to eight weeks to put a digital business process into production. As soon as it's in production, you start getting adoption and seeing the return on investment, because FlowForma tracks everything and shows you how quickly the process is being carried out.

Paul Stone17:21

I'm watching the clock, so maybe it's time for some Q&A. Anna, if you could give me some questions, that would be great.

Anna17:34

We have a number of questions for you, Paul. First of all, once a process is automated, who is usually in charge of maintaining it?

Paul Stone17:46

Great question. Typically, the person who built it originally is the first port of call. The system is designed for business people to build their own processes, and they have all the knowledge of the process, so typically the business person maintains it.

Paul Stone18:18

We have various deployment models. Some clients hand it straight to business people, who are trained up in a two-day training cycle and start building their own solutions. Others start building in IT, gently bring users up to speed and then let the business take on maintenance. Every client is a little different, and we're very happy to advise on the best approach for you.

Anna18:57

Another question, from Ajit, about using the product in a legacy mechanical machine manufacturing environment.

Paul Stone19:09

FlowForma is designed for people carrying out tasks, so it's really a human-facing system. The screenshot you saw earlier was a form filled in by people carrying out the steps in a process. But the system also has a back end that integrates with other things: machine control systems that support an API, for example, or your accounting system, SAP or ERP. So the system focuses on people executing tasks to achieve a business goal, and in the background it integrates with systems like machine control.

Anna20:08

Another question for you, Paul: do you have any tips to help us prioritize which processes to automate?

Paul Stone20:19

Absolutely. FlowForma is all about digitizing at scale. It's very easy to digitize a solution, so don't just do it once; do it many times. Where should you start? Pick a process with a wide impact, one that many different people will use, and digitize it first. That gets you exposure in the business, and you can use it to generate interest, drive momentum and roll out to a wider range of processes.

Paul Stone21:05

Sometimes clients come to us with very complex processes they want to digitize first. You can do that, but it will take longer. It may be better to start with something simpler that has a broader audience, get the ROI there first and build momentum for change, then move on to the more complex ones.

Anna21:44

Another question: could I enable my suppliers and customers to take part in a process digitized with FlowForma?

Paul Stone21:55

Yes, absolutely. We support external interactions. You can kick off a process and assign, say, the second step to people outside your organization: suppliers, clients or any external partner. You can control it tightly, so a supplier fills in a form at step two but has no visibility of the rest of the process. Letting external people complete steps is one of our unique selling points, and it's fully tracked in the audit trail.

Anna22:53

Excellent. Paul, before we finish, is there anything you'd like to say to our viewers?

Paul Stone23:01

The one thing I'd say is: don't be afraid, and get started. Implementing FlowForma is all about making change in your business and doing things more productively, and we make that as easy as possible. We have a very short onboarding program, so you quickly become familiar with the system and start making change.

Paul Stone23:29

It's also very easy to deploy a process in FlowForma and then change it. So when you deploy a process, don't focus on getting it perfect. Get a draft out there, get people interacting with it, take their feedback and change it until they're happy. It's very easy to get the ball rolling, so try it out, and contact us through our website for a demonstration.

Anna24:01

Excellent, thank you so much, Paul. I'd like to remind our viewers that the next session is starting now, so please go back to the lobby page to join in. Thanks.