Overcoming production concerns due to coronavirus | Blog | Objective
The COVID-19 pandemic continues to affect individuals and businesses worldwide. Some manufacturers have been required to pause production, while others have continued as their products are essential. While the pandemic continues, there has been an increased focus on taking steps to resume operations and restart economic activity across the board.
The effects of COVID-19, and concern for new spikes in infections, mean there most likely will not be a return to business as usual. Instead, manufacturers and other businesses are looking to slowly resume production and activity safely.

Ensuring safety means altering how individuals work together, but it also can be facilitated with technologies aimed at limiting human contact.

Automated processes can help manufacturers remove touchpoints and solve issues incident with coronavirus infection through systems that optimize scheduling, communication, supply chain management, and more.

Implementing safety standards uniformly

Coronavirus, the virus that causes COVID-19, spreads rapidly and sustainably between people. Because of this, health experts highly recommend social distancing as an important tool in limiting the virus’s spread. Manufacturers can implement social distancing and sanitization measures throughout the workplace to keep employees, vendors, and others safe. Large meetings can be avoided or replaced with teleconferences or smaller groupings where each participant remains a safe distance apart. Production floors can be marked with arrows to route foot traffic in a way that is efficient while maintaining a safe distance between employees. Employee and visitor protocols can be amended to reduce the risk of infection, such as providing handwashing stations throughout the workplace and separate restrooms for visitors.

The list of social distancing and safety measures is large, and your operation may have unique needs. What is most crucial is finding the right systems to incorporate these measures into your daily workflows and automate elements where necessary. A list of rules is just one step. Implementing these controls helps ensure the safety of all.

 

Leveraging technology for safety and greater efficiencies

While the pandemic may require you to have less employees on the production floor, it does not have to result in loss of productivity. Objective supply chain execution software provides a single system solution for all logistics planning, from inbound and outbound logistics to production orders and human resources planning. Objective can help you do more with the same amount of people, or even a reduction in staff caused by the pandemic.

The single system solution helps eliminate production steps and areas that can introduce infection risk. One way is through paperless digital document delivery and storage, removing paper handoffs and enabling multi device access for workstations and processes. Objective can also power remote access, either offsite or onsite. Creating a safe work environment becomes much easier when supported through systems that monitor, track employee status and skills, trace product steps throughout the production cycle, and create operator and picker routes consistent with social distancing planning. Objective does more than just support reduced touchpoints. It can be fully leveraged to solve a host of issues across your supply chain, workforce management, scheduling, communication, order handling and predictive maintenance. By increasing visibility into all aspects of how manufacturing tasks are completed, supervisors can react quickly to problems much faster than if aided by manual processes alone. With enhanced transparency, you can free up the manufacturing floor space and reduce stock buffers, increase product availability and quality, while providing valuable traceability and documentation for customers, vendors, and employees.

With Objective, you have full traceability and product genealogy from the moment the raw materials are received, throughout each step and to final product shipment. Each item’s product passport can be traced back to its original lot/batch, operator at each station, original inventory, and which machines and areas its route along the way. This streamlined and well-managed processes is critical in food or medical/pharmaceutical industries. Objective’s quick traceability leads you back to root issues and also provides intelligence on which other lots/batches could be impacted.

Objective provides a complete oversight and planning tool to aid in your safety efforts during the pandemic, and achieve new levels of efficiency and productivity, even in the absence of COVID-19 related limitations. Achieve better manufacturing results, while ensuring safety for your workers and vendors, and their families.

Objective provides the most value by enabling the right level of oversight and efficiency. The COVID-19 pandemic is an unfortunate event that will likely alter many aspects of society for the foreseeable future, but for manufacturers, these changes do not have to be at the expense of productivity. Automate your manufacturing processes with Objective, and experience safety and productivity at amazing new levels.

It’s easy to see how Objective delivers results. Our product demonstrations and onsite proof of concept trials can be handled outside of client locations, with no need for Objective employees to be on premises. Remote demonstration saves time, keeps your employees safe, and is just another way that Objective can help you navigate a successful reopening.

To learn more about how Objective can steer your manufacturing back to pre-pandemic production – or even better, download our simple guide today. Contact us today to schedule a demo.

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