How can Canadian manufacturing companies reduce costs?

By anna smith

It seems that manufacturing has not been recovering in Canada post-recession, and the situation is not aided by the oil and gas sectors' troubles. For example, Alberta has been experiencing large-scale layoffs, emptying offices, and falling house prices for the past couple of years.

Experts say that one of the best ways to deal with the sluggish economy is to turn inward and to optimize the internal processes (including production) of the company. Such practices are currently seen around the world: manufacturing companies are spending in digital technology areas, such as process automatization, analytics, mobile, and cloud that lower costs and help improve production.

While many Canadian manufacturing companies decide to take a different approach and to scale down by reducing staff, there are some that face the challenge by directing their resources to process optimization. These companies take recession as an opportunity to save money by being more efficient. For many, efficiency building often turns out to be the step towards modernization that changes how the company operates from its core.

Currently, there are many examples of Canadian manufacturing companies implementing robots - which is a great step towards optimization, but not many understand the value of software that helps increase productivity and optimize costs. When audits of manufacturing companies are performed, oftentimes the losses that are found are directly related to inefficient information management (poorly managed time reports, lost contracts and other human errors). These issues are mostly common in small and midsize companies.

One of the new tools on the market that helps companies manage business processes is the DocLogix platformspecifically designed to help manufacturing companies deal with information chaos, gain transparency and increase productivity.

DocLogix automates and organizes all the company’s information flows, tasks and communication between administration and production. It integrates with a company’s ERP system and complements it, without the need for any programming.

Especially benefiting small and midsize companies, DocLogix helps reduce labour costs by 37 percent per produced item, increases productivity by 26 percent and increases overall traceability and visibility by 45 percent.

With its current Canada-oriented campaign, DocLogix aims to select 30 most promising Canadian small and midsized manufacturing companies to grant them with 60 percent off for DocLogix manufacturing platform implementation.

“The reason we have started this campaign is that we see a huge gap between European small and midsized manufacturing companies and Canadian ones. Here in Canada, most manufacturing companies are far away from information technologies. While having huge plans for exports and profitability, they still lack attention onto better performance through adopting information technologies,” states Aurimas Bakas, DocLogix chairman of the board.

When correctly implemented, DocLogix can produce the return of up to 80 CAD per one dollar spent. How does it work? When a company installs DocLogix system, its entire document management process suddenly becomes automated and very easy to monitor, with no specific IT knowledge required. The system connects the document-heavy back office with production-only part of the company. The production manager can now access all the information about sales, acquisitions, maintenance schedules, time reports and productivity, which enables a more efficient human resource management and increase in profitability.

Manufacturing companies need to have a clear long-term digital strategy that would allow for productivity increase and cost optimization.
 

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