Bring New Technology into Your Supply Chain
A common line I hear from people is “I don’t have time…” This is probably one of my favourite lines to hear from people. This means you are either taking on too much work, managing your time inefficiently, or you are not delegating tasks appropriately - or all of the above. I’m a true believer in nothing is impossible; manage your time wisely and anything is possible.
A lot of people don’t realize the value of bring in software and technology into your company. A great way to validate this point is take a notepad out and draw a line down the middle of the page. On one side of the page write down your daily tasks, for example: writing the same email thanking a purchase order, writing out purchase/sales orders, shipping memos, production reports, appointment times, scheduling appointments, HR reports…etc. On the other side of the page write down how many times you complete the task daily or weekly. If you write down on the list a procedure more than 3 times, it might be worth while investing in automating it.
Not only are you wasting valuable time on repetitive tasks, but you also missing all the important data that goes along with it. Even if your team is the smartest team in the world, they are going to miss trends that are occurring within your data, if it’s not being analyzed. This is why it is important to use automation in your company, especially for logistics automation.
For example: you could be missing out on one more shipment per day per dock. When time is constrained it would be easy to overlook a 10 minute gap between shipments.
-Say your average appointment time is 1 hour
-You have 10 appointments in that dock per day.
-That’s almost an hour and 40 minutes wasted per day
-If you cut down that window to 5 minutes
All this equals:
- 1 extra appointment per day
- if you have 5 docks that an extra 5 appointments per day.
It’s easy to overlook the little things, however tracking this data can help optimize your shipping in your company. Even if you’re tracking the data manually, there’s a high chance that there will be errors in the data which can lead to inaccurate analysis. The only way to try to get the most accurate data is to try and automate the procedure as much as possible.
As a manager/supervisor/executive the best part of software is that you can monitor information at all times. You don’t have to rely on someone else to provide you with information such as what the production or the shipping schedule is. You can use software to evaluate the performance of your employees as well as keep track of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). With how tough the economy is today, if you want your company to survive against the competition you have to be at the front of the pack for technology. If not your competitors will surpass you as they learn to not only replicate your procedures but automate them.
Try DataDocks today and start automating your processes today to stay ahead of the market.
