Social media on the manufacturing floor

Your business produces vast amounts of communication every day. Colleagues communicate informally via email, WhatsApp, Slack and numerous other platforms. It’s quick and easy, but is it smart? What happens to all the information being bounced back and forth via these channels?

Just try to retrieve it

We’ve all experienced it: a machine malfunctions and the person who knows how to fix it isn’t in the office. So you take a photo, send it via WhatsApp and (hopefully) learn how to fix the problem. This might be a good solution in the short term, but if it happens to somebody else the next time, they have to start from scratch. After all, the information was communicated via WhatsApp, meaning it wasn’t embedded.

Thanks to the explosion of messaging platforms, there’s a divide between official and informal information streams within every organisation. Quotations, product manuals, work instructions or presentations are properly saved and stored for years. But discussions relating to those documents, which are often essential to understanding how a process proceeded or why a certain decision was made, run via informal channels. This information gets lost in local mailboxes or WhatsApp accounts and can’t be accessed by others who might stand to benefit from it.

Combine storage with communication

The solution is actually very simple: integrate the possibility for rapid, informal communication into the business software. This way, employees retain the possibility to align quickly with colleagues, but that communication takes place within your own environment- where communication concerning a malfunction, delayed order or new client is stored and searchable.

This is exactly what social collaboration by Exact does. It combines storage and communication, in an environment fully managed by you. Discussions concerning factory malfunctions or rush orders are held and stored in the environment where the maintenance contract of the machine and the contact details of that client are also stored: a very practical solution.

No quick fixes, but fundamental solutions

Part of being a manufacturer is constantly striving for improvement and the elimination of waste. In other words, you’re not just looking for quick fixes, but for fundamental solutions. Correspondence over social media concerning incidents can help enormously in analysing root causes; you’ll find and be able to fix causes you didn’t even know existed.

What happened? Why? When? How did we solve it? Why in this particular manner? Which subsequent actions emerged from this? The answers to these questions make the difference between merely treating symptoms and eliminating root causes.

The transparent storage of actions and interactions for all users provides a clear audit trail and allows you to learn from the past- and all that within the secure environment of your own system. What more could you ask for?