A regular day in a manufacturing setup looks much similar to the “Beer Game” by MIT Professor Jay Forrestor in the year 1960, and discussed in detail by Peter Senge in his seminal book The Fifth Discipline to elaborate systems thinking. Out daily life in manufacturing or any supply chain driven environment is no different. Our material management module, awaits inputs from GRN receipts since the GRN notes are in paper and someone has to manually key in the data. The plant maintenance module does not remind me of due maintenance every week because the maintenance schedule is noted in an excel-sheet and the engineer who manages it, needs to upload this every day without fail, finance module does not reflect the entire receivables list because the receivable management sheet gets updated once every 15 days. Dealer inventory module reflects enough inventory, but the dealers are calling up for immediate delivery, and of course the production team is not aware about it, and the list goes on and on…
Our daily life is a never ending struggle managing these challenges, and we try to firefight everyday with our excel sheets, applications and or plain brute long working hours. Digitization does helps us in manage it but at a cost and resource requirement which is commercially prohibitive, technically complex and resourcefully time taking. We have our ERP system sitting at one place with modules working in silos or quasi-silo while we all struggle to manage the last mile connectivity for real time updates.
Planning to mitigate these hurdles is easy part, but implementing it is expensive, resource hungry and takes time to execute it. And once implemented, the effort to bring in even the smallest of change is a herculean effort.
This is where a “low Code/ No Code Platform” is bringing a paradigm change. The platform allows to create and change last mile applications on the go as per users need and plugs in with the ERP to update real time data with ease. Being cloud native, it’s easy to start with, can be update digitally from any device, being API ready makes it easier to connect with any of you ERP system. And not to mention that its simplicity makes it’s ready to use in days rather than weeks or month.
Working on the principle of MVP (minimum viable product) the platform gives us the privilege to create the minimum workable application which gets the work done in days. Once the viable results are see, you can keep making changes and upgrades features as you feel the need. Basically you are up and running within days and with minimum outlay. Be it receivable management, inventory tracking, vendor onboarding & tracking, maintenance and audit, field surveys, you name a process and the platform allows to get it started in a days’ time.
It also allows you to integrated with you legacy system with ease enabling your ERP system to work real-time with minimum time and effort. And the most important feature which I personally feel good about is the ability to scrap the application and start afresh if it does not work our well.
