Manufacturing companies are in a battle to stay ahead of aggressive competition, logistics issues, hiring backlogs, and globalization while keeping costs in line. In addition, as mergers and acquisitions ripple through the industry, chaos can ensue internally as redundancies, confusion, and complexity threaten performance. Manufacturers have focused on automating what happens on the shop floor - now it’s time to apply the same thinking to office workflows. Manufacturing companies can adapt more quickly to all these forces with workflow management. 

Whether a company is considering process transformation for a specific use case, an integrated layer on top of existing ERP, CRM, etc., or an end-to-end organizational transformation, workflow management solutions like Interwebflow can help. 

Some of the ways Interwebflow’s workflow automation can help manufacturing companies:

• Shorten purchasing and budgeting cycle times
• Improve and quicken product lifecycle development
• Standardize product quality management and governance
• Shorten supply chain cycle for approvals and receipt of goods
• Streamline complex document approval processes
• Improve and standardize safety reporting

Use Case Examples

Manufacturing Compliance

Manufacturing companies, especially in highly-regulated industries like pharmaceuticals, health tech, and aerospace are required to meet a variety of regulatory requirements from agencies like the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

Using workflow automation platforms allows these manufacturers to standardize regulated processes and provide complete audit trails to meet reporting standards for compliance areas like:

• Anti-corruption
• Data protection
• Fair competition
• Health, safety, environmental
• IT safety and security
• Product safety

Capital and Operational Expenditure Requests

With a large volume of submitted capital expenditure requests, there is a significant risk of mistakes, delays, compliance, and visibility. Given the investment, the cost of these risks can be enormous. By deploying a compliant and consistent workflow for handling capital expenditure requests, manufacturing companies can greatly reduce risk while getting a faster return on capital spending.

Product Lifecycle Development

As manufacturing companies deal with global expansion, competitive pressure, regulatory changes, and changing consumer expectations, getting new products to market faster and faster is critical. Unfortunately, the process of creating new products never gets easier. While product development cycles can’t be shortcuts, they can be managed better with workflow management. By building a structured workflow around R&D, Quality, Production, Packaging, and Marketing, manufacturing companies can reduce risk and ensure quality while avoiding process bottlenecks. That means products get to market faster.

Quality Control

Workflow management and automation replaces manual, paper-based quality management systems that are inefficient and prone to error. An automated quality management system increases compliance whether an organization is beholden to regulatory rules, is interested in improving its quality standards, or conforms to ISO Standards.

More Examples

Finance

• Purchase Requisition
• Capital Expense Request
• Contract Management
• New Product Evaluation
• Central Supply Requests
• Item Exception Requests
• New Product Evaluation
• Report Requests

Human Resources

• Onboarding
• Employee Change of Status
• HR Inquiry
• Offboarding
• Payroll Adjustment

Information Technology

• Access Requests
• Project Requests
• Work Orders
• Office Move
• Security Incident Reporting

We Understand Workflow for Manufacturing

It’s a unique industry with challenges, regulations, and complexity not seen in other industries, and we thrive in it. Our experienced service and support team can ensure your workflow project is successful, on time, and within budget.