Ishtiak Alam Jordge
Industrial Engineer and Global Project Responsible, H&M
More than a decade ago I started my career in a RMG factory with the responsibility of leading some cutting edge projects. One of my projects was to create an end to end supply chain visibility for better control, forecasting and wastage reduction. As I was working on the value stream mapping, I was surprised to discover an extremely redundant and non-value added set of processes across all departments. And, what’s more surprising is that, this non value added processes are still practiced in most of our factories.
During my project in the past I developed a software application what resolved some parts of the problem. But I was limited by my skills and available technology. Today I’ve developed another application which I believe is an effective solution to automate these non-value added processes.
By now you must be wondering what are the set of non-value added processes?
These are the ways purchase orders or POs are being processed currently. When a factory receives the POs from customers, these are sent to 6-7 different departments and each department tend to print the POs and then process the PO information by manually punching the data in computer or even worse making calculations on a notebook (these happens mostly in the cutting and finishing sections). And each department have multiple report formats which are maintained, updated and shared manually every time a PO is received. The whole process is repeated each time a PO gets revised and finding the revision is often another big hustle.
Now, what are the major problems here?
The same PO is getting shared, printed, processed and stored in different departments. So, the same information is being processed and the same document is getting printed multiple times in a discrete manner.
Human error is inevitable during manual data entry. Each error causes either over or under production and various other financial losses.
The unnecessary PO and report printing causes huge environmental impact in terms of paper, ink and energy consumption along with associated labor and space consumption for paper printing, storage and disposal.
What is my solution?
An automatic conversion system that can digitally extract all the necessary information from the pdf PO sheets, store in a central smart database, perform any given calculation and can generate all sort of reports for different departments. No PO printing and manual data entry or reporting is required. Even for an ERP, compatible reports can be generated to be imported directly without any manual input.
I’m very excited with the development and inspired to make a massive environmental impact with this process automation and operational excellence. I would love to learn more in case anyone is working in this area.
