What does the manufacturing process have to do with darkness and black holes? In this video, I explain it, and share how you can remain beautifully in control of what’s happening in production.
If you’re in manufacturing, you might appreciate this snippet of insight into an often unfathomable process. But, if not, this might be a metaphor you can apply to your own business.
Where’s your business black hole? We all have one.
Transcript
There’s a big challenge in any complex manufacturing process, visibility. It’s an even bigger problem in print on demand. Why? Because we’ve got really complex business processes. And in our world, from the moment that an item leaves print to the moment that it gets to ship in most factories, its existence is unknown. It’s a black hole. You know the item is there, you just don’t know where exactly. So let’s unpack that a bit. If you have a product that takes two or three days to make, then you’ve got two or three days you have to assume the product is making its happy journey all the way through your process. And that’s fine if things are going perfectly, perfectly running to time, running to schedule, people are there, volumes are consistent, nothing’s breaking down. But when challenges develop, you need a better way to keep the business on track. And from our perspective, that solution is called Zensmart. What we do is that we shine a light into all of those black holes by giving you the ability to track every single thing that happens by both a person and a machine in the sequence that each component follows down through production. We attach a series of production events to every component of every order at every process stage. And by tracking all of those events, we know exactly where an item is in time and space. We know who’s working on it, what they’ve done, where, which station they’re working on and when they’re working on it. And because of that, you remain beautifully in control of what’s happening in production. So if that sounds like something that might be helpful in your business, reach out to me and I’ll be really happy to explain exactly how we do it in the Zensmart too.
