Avoiding unnecessary bureaucracy in manufacturing

The increased level of bureaucracy since 1950

According to several researches, opinions and scientific studies the level of bureaucracy (unnecessary paperwork let me say) has dramatically risen since World War II. And in all spheres of society:

government
social sphere
services
industries

Bureaucracy has risen since 1950 in the U.S. government

The same is for example mentioned by economic anthropologist David Graeber who also influenced several of today’s younger scientists and researchers on the field of economy.

Bureaucracy level

Direct impact of bureaucracy to the manufacturing area

Let’s take a simple picture of manufacturing 100 years ago. The manufacturing companies were simpler, smaller and the produced products were simpler. There were lower number of people involved in the process.

We could say that as a manufacturer you received the order (in many cases just by shaking hands) and then you produced for example a shirt. Then you handed it over to the customer and received the money.

And if you wanted to increase your manufacturing capacity you just hired more people who were able to create a shirt.

Then something has changed

In the last 50 years the pace of growth of work which secures the running of other work(ers) has outpaced the growth of other occupations. In other words we are more and more forced to execute work which is not to produce, which is designed to:

control,
report,
archive,
distribute information,
evidence
find information
forward

the manufacturing (and others) work.

How it is linked to manufacturing execution and software

It means that in the recent 50 years we somehow accepted the status quo that it is normal to:

print a lot of paper and deliver it somewhere else
spend more than 20% of your working time with reporting something (filling and forwarding excels)
reprint something
spend several meetings daily or weekly in order to know what to do
spent more than 50% of your working time to get from some software(s) hopefully relevant information
and then checking that in order to be sure the information is correct
shred the above used papers

So none of that is manufacturing. None of that is adding direct value to the product.

What if I want to change that

How to revert the trend of involving more and more unnecessary bureaucracy into the manufacturing processes?

We have been thinking about that hundreds of hours in our offices, at the customer’s factories and with the contribution of several universities.

Therefore we found out we have to create completely new approach to how the Manufacturing software should work. Completely different to what the status quo is.

We kept to these crucial prerequisites:

0% of paper printing
0% of time spent with distribution information (i.e. work orders)
1 source of truth (= 1 software for the whole Door – to – Door manufacturing process
100% data reliability
So intuitive that the training isn’t a must
What took hours should take minutes (with regards to manufacturing management)
What took minutes should take seconds (for example changing the plan)
Be able to work remotely from any place in the world (we decided that before something like Covid existed)

What came out of it

We are still at the beginning, but right know you have an option. An option to choose software which allows you:

Instanty share the one source of data manufacturing data
Work faster and independently and at the same time be interconnect with people from other teams
Avoid unnecessary reporting and meetings as the system already did it
Understand what is going on and where are the manufacturing bottleneck just by one click
Decrease the time & material necessary to secure safe production flow with no material supply outages