You’ve decided to bubble up with two other households this year, and you’re the host. After the commotion of your Christmas shopping trips, one of your son’s presents isn’t due to arrive until Christmas Eve. This gives you minimal time to check it’s right. Some family members are travelling across the country on Christmas Eve. There’s no doubt that the roads will be chaotic as everyone has similar plans. You’ve also been warned that you HAVE to watch the TV Christmas specials on Christmas Day because it’s not really Christmas without them.
There’s lots to do at Christmas time, and we don’t mean drinking Baileys and wandering around Christmas markets. For the person hosting on Christmas Day, it can be easy to feel overwhelmed by people’s requests and an overload of information. There’s nothing worse than a cluttered head space, especially if you have work commitments floating around your brain too. You may use a digital MRP/ERP system to track KPIs, create tables of data and schedule reports weekly so that you can monitor productivity. However, we know that no matter how amazing your system is, there will be drawbacks. Let’s fast forward a little.
4pm on Christmas Eve
T’was the night before Christmas, and all through the house. You’re hard at work in the factory, leaving Christmas planning to your spouse! You know that you need to get back shortly because there’s so much to do, but you can’t help but dread it. You may have a couple of days off, but that doesn’t mean that you can relax. You’ve already tackled the shops this year so you have all (but one) of your presents. A household member managed to source the ever-important turkey, meaning you now have all components for the perfect Christmas dinner. Despite this, you still have the hosting to accomplish and you’ve got to ensure that the factory remains productive in your absence.
You have asked one of the shop floor operatives to call you when vital orders are complete. It’s now 7pm and you’ve heard nothing about your son’s parcel that’s due. You end up discussing the priority job with your employee for over 20 minutes. They can’t give you detailed information because the machine is still working, but they’ve said it will be finished tonight. Despite this, you can’t give the customer an update because you can’t risk something going wrong and then delaying them. After getting off the phone, you track your parcel using an app and see that you are his next stop. Perfect!
You check traffic updates on your phone after finishing wrapping. Your family call and say that they’re stuck in queues but they have traffic updates turned on. You work out that they will be arriving within the next hour and set a timer to make some food when they are nearby. If only a timer was this effective back at work! You wouldn’t have to keep a close eye on incoming orders in the case that one is a priority customer. Meanwhile, your factory operatives are working hard to finalise orders before their days off. You’ve already scheduled a report for 29th of December to catch up, but it means employees have to wait a few days to know whether they achieved targets. You wish that getting real-time information for the factory was as easy as checking traffic updates.
Christmas Day
You’re still waiting for an update on the arrival of your final household within the bubble, and you can’t continue cooking until you have this information. Everyone’s feeling festive after handing out presents, but your partner can’t contain their excitement over the Christmas Specials. Even though your TV box will work out clashes automatically, the bumper Radio Times has been highlighted within an inch of its life! They won’t be happy unless Christmas dinner is ticked off before the first TV programme starts! You’re trying to break down all of the information you have about cooking times, arrival times and programme times. With so many different sources of information, it’s really difficult.
A lack of real-time information
With a little help from the family, Christmas Day was a success. It’s back to reality again, and you’re in the office looking over the data from the last few days. You use the generated report to update employees. A few staff members said that the report’s insights helps them to improve, but you’re worried that their previous work wasn’t up to scratch.
One of your customers has complained that a late delivery on the 23rd of December has resulted in their product being delayed. It’s safe to say that they aren’t happy. However, you don’t know why, because as far as your MRP/ERP system is concerned, the machine was operating as planned. The employees who worked on the job are still off, so you won’t have any information from them until tomorrow. Your customer feedback doesn’t match this, and the confusion over the data reminds you of your Christmas routine all over again.
Using real-time information to improve
Our team at Fitfactory are amazing at creating digital solutions, but sadly we don’t have one for hosting at Christmas. Despite this, we do have the perfect tool that to help you monitor real-time information on your factory. It allows you to integrate several different data sources and analyse them together so you always have a cohesive view of your factory, allowing you to make decisions at the right time. Our Business Intelligence module will monitor real-time data that you can access anywhere at the click of a button.
Remember the ease of tracking the delivery drive back on Christmas Eve? Well, with Business Intelligence, you will find tracking orders this simple in your factory too. You can access the module on a phone, laptop, or tablet and view real-time information from jobs as they happen.
It can be accessed right on the shop floor, and many of our customers implement screens on the shop floor so staff can monitor the KPIs and updates that are most important to them and progress quickly. And, you won’t need to worry about giving customers the wrong information, as the software pulls internal and external data sources together to give a unified understanding of productivity. You can share real-time reports with customers to maintain full traceability.
Our drag-and-drop report builder makes your job simple, and you won’t have to schedule them to run once per week anymore. New reports will make it easy for you to explore your data in new ways, meaning that you won’t suffer from mismatched information. With our Business Intelligence module, you’ll never worry about missing a priority order again. You can set up alerts so that you know when a new request is received or when important changes occur.
Have the most intelligent Christmas possible
With the chance to win a year free of our Business Intelligence module, you’ve got the perfect opportunity to make this your most intelligent Christmas yet! Take advantage of our tool so that you can maximise productivity in the factory whilst worrying less at Christmas. Interested in how to electronically capture your Christmas Data, or how to plan efficiently over the festive period? Take a look at our other Christmas blog posts.
For more information on the Business Intelligence module, contact our team today. Next year, you may end up dreaming of a similar tool for hosting your Christmas Day!