Did you know the average person walks through 50 doors a day? That adds up to more than a million doors in a lifetime (which is quite a lot). A door usually symbolizes a transition: between rooms, from inside to outside, or from one stage of life to the next. An open door can mean opportunity. A closed one, confinement. In both fiction and even gameshows, doors often represent choices, opportunity, or loss.
On a typical shop floor though, there’s a remarkable lack of doors. You might have one to the tool crib, a centralized room or two, the front offices, and most importantly–the doors to your dock. Those dock doors are the most critical in your business. They determine whether you’re making money or losing it.
Your team is trained to push work “out the door”. Once shipments hit the truck, you can bill customers and count it as cash your way. Boxes, crates, cartons, and pallets all move out through those openings out the side or back wall. On the surface, that sounds like a good thing to focus on.
But here’s the reality: not every order leaving your shop is profitable.
In Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, he once wrote about bankruptcy happening “gradually, then suddenly.” For manufacturers, margin loss works the same way. If you’re giving away margin on your work – losing money on every sale – you will not make it up in volume. True profitability means balancing labor, materials, rework, scrap, and the opportunity cost of lost jobs while your team chases errors (busy redoing, finding or recording something on paper).
When those factors aren’t aligned, every job rolling out the dock door chips away at your bottom line.
That’s where a paperless manufacturing system comes in. Instead of relying on guesswork or chasing paper in job packets, you get the tools to see your entire operation in real-time–and fix problems before they hit your margins.
Imagine having the immediate answers to questions like:
There are a lot of questions that you can answer with a simple routing, but it’s not enough to drive your business. A routing and a job packet can tell your team what you want and need them to do. You can give them instructions or even ask them to record the work they’re doing. A system that runs on a routing and allows your team to clock-on and-off the job may be able to display the work and (rarer) the work you did. But it will never tell you how you’re performing.
That kind of limited tracking closes the door on the real data you need. A true paperless manufacturing system gives you the critical information we believe you need–without the human capital–such as:
This is how you keep your dock doors moving the right jobs out the right way: profitable, on-time and repeatable. Want to know if a paperless system is right for your shop? Explore our solutions
The physical dock doors may be the only ones you see each day, but the invisible “doors” of your production process matter just as much. A paperless manufacturing system will give you the shop floor productivity tools you want and the job tracking you need. If you’re not able to accurately predict and manage work in your shop, as it happens, you are shutting the door on competing in today’s fast-moving and demanding economy.
At CIMx, we help small and mid-size manufacturers open the right doors every day. If you’re not sure how a paperless system could help–or if you’re worried about how expensive they may be to implement and keep–reach out
We’ll walk you through it. Because in manufacturing, the right doors lead to profitability, growth, and winning in a tough market.