Manufacturing

Value Stream Mapping – Current and Future States

Value Stream Mapping – Current and Future States

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If you’ve ever witnessed a brilliant idea with the potential to develop into a successful and innovative product or service succumb to stagnant development and breakdowns, or if you’re on the IT service side of things and just cannot keep up with a ticket pile that never seems to come down and never seem to get around missed SLAs, you’re still a part of the problem and not the solution.

Enter Value Stream Mapping

In the tech world, where complexities are often overwhelming and process traps are prevalent, it is indeed difficult to circumvent bottlenecks and rabbit holes. Still, there surely has to be a solution to it. If these problems are so commonplace, how do some teams deliver agile development solutions and seem to get them right all the time?

You will find the answer to these questions, and the solutions to your many software development problems, in Value Stream Mapping (VSM). A concept borrowed from Lean manufacturing, this visual tool is capable of mapping out entire workflows of work and information to direct every process component from the initial request to final delivery. At every stage, VSM red flags hidden waste and inefficient steps to help you plug time and resource drain.

Set it up optimally and VSM is a lot more than just a diagnostic tool. VSM can act as the bridge between your current state and planned future state by helping you zero in on targeted improvements and line up tech solutions to overhaul your operations through lean, efficient, and resourceful improvements.

Identifying Common Pain Points in Tech and Acknowledging Impact

Identifying these pain points and acknowledging the operational inefficiency they introduce at various stages is a crucial first step in setting into motion the plan to streamline your processes.

Excessive Handoffs: Projects changing hands too often with numerous teams and individuals involved. This leads to a breakdown in communication and complicates collaboration and decision-making.

Waiting Time: Idle gaps in the process while waiting for resource approvals or resolutions can add days and weeks to project timelines, demotivating teams and stalling progress. These gaps also lead to attrition.

Overprocessing: Redundant systems depending on manual inputs add unnecessary steps to the process, increasing complexities, adding to errors, and weighing down the entire development cycle.

Defects and Rework: When error rates are high, they translate to increased reworks and bug fixes, resulting in a drain on resources, repetition of efforts, and ultimately, unsatisfied clients and lost reputation.

Lack of Visibility: In the absence of real-time visibility and transparency, teams are only putting out fires when they should be proactively introducing efficiencies. This general chaos hinders communication and leaves customers stranded with little or no information.

Tech Issues: The lack of automation and outdated tools and platforms force manual intervention, which in addition to wasting human hours, further adds to errors and delays as well as exhaustion and frustration.

The Current State Map: Your Present Reality Snapshot

The Current State Map is a visualization of your current workflow state. With the help of key components, it presents you a picture of not how you THINK your workflow functions but how it TRULY functions.

Process Steps: Break down steps, identify individuals, teams, or systems responsible for them, and line up the entire process from request to delivery.

Information Flow: Trace data and request paths, identify system and manual collaborations, and tag every information-exchange touchpoint.

Time Data: Track the duration of each step, calculate wait times, and decipher just how much lead time it takes from start to finish.

Inventory or Work in Progress: Identify bottlenecks, ticket queues, features stuck in development, and every possible juncture where things get stagnant.

Key Metrics: Measure, calculate, and apply quantifiable metrics to each element. Whether it is escalations or revisions, put a number to everything.

This current state map reveals shortfalls, inefficiencies, and wastes, only so you can identify the pitfalls of your current workflow and identify and prioritize areas of improvements. In opening your eyes to these shortcomings, you can now envision a seamless workflow and optimal operations and leverage tech advancements to accomplish these goals.

The Future State Map: Your Blueprint for Streamlined Tech Operations

Create and use your Future State Map as a visualization of the state of processes you would like to achieve. Dedicate this blueprint to making your operations leaner, quicker, efficient, and tech-enabled. Key focus areas in your Future State Map must include:

Waste Elimination: Identify and eliminate all steps in your process that add no value, streamline handoffs,reduce wait times, remove bottlenecks, and optimize resource mileage.

Optimized Workflows: Identify gaps and streamline workflows, work towards a pull system, and aim to work on and reduce work-in-progress projects to add value and flow to operations.

Tech-Enabled Processes: Line up specific tools and platforms to address pain points discovered in the Current State Map. Aim to eliminate manual tasks, introduce analytics dashboards, and break down silos.

Measurable Goals: Assign quantifiable terms to tasks and targets, set specific and measurable goals, and use metrics to guide your objectives onto the right track and eventual fruition.

Collaborative Platforms: Set up collaborative platforms to assess and assign responsibilities, increase communication between teams and individuals, and add transparency to your operations.

The Future State Map can never be expected to accomplish an overnight transformation, but it surely guides your efforts and assigns to it a clear and defined blueprint so that you may prioritize your efforts and investments on the way to achieving process optimization on all fronts.

Digital Tools as Your VSM Allies for Lean Optimization

Armed with your Current and Future State Maps, you can now achieve your Value Stream Mapping (VSM) goals by strategic tech adoption. Here’s how you can define your tech stack to achieve your VSM goals by strategically introducing the right technologies into specific value streams and achieve the optimized vision in your Future State Map.

Automation and Orchestration: Introduce automation tools to automatically trigger actions based on the completion of tasks. This eliminates delays caused by wait times for approvals. Orchestration platforms help visualize dependencies and eliminate bottlenecks while allocating resources and automating approvals. In software development, CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment) pipelines accelerate development and deployment.

Real-Time Data and Analytics: Your VSM provides real-time information provided by integrated systems through data dashboards. Tracking KPIs helps identify bottlenecks, and advanced analytics helps forecast problems and line up appropriate proactive action. In IT service delivery, for example, real-time analytics helps streamline processes by identifying hidden issues.

Collaboration and Communication Platforms: Slack, MS Teams, and other similar tools act as a central platform for communication, information-sharing, and even documentation, reducing the risk of lost information. Real-time updates and prompt feedback and troubleshooting lead to a connected and united work environment. Even in distributed work environments, these cloud-based tools help overcome the challenges of location and provide a highly collaborative work platform.

Cloud Solutions: The scalability of cloud solutions make them resourceful and affordable, and give your infrastructure the flexibility it needs to work optimally in a global environment. AI and machine learning tools make the cloud even more conducive for tasks that require scalability without compromising on tool and platform access.

Tailored Tool Recommendations: CI/CD platforms, service desk software, data warehousing and business intelligence tools, and process mining tools add up to a formidable lineup that optimize functions to accelerate software delivery. Whether it is consolidation of data from multiple sources or uncovering deviations and setbacks, these tools address specific issues and offer integrated solutions that work in tandem with the system.

While defining the tech stack can also be an ongoing process, optimizing this lineup requires the strategic integration of tools and platforms so that the future state you’re aiming for can be achieved with minimal waste of time and resources.

Parallel Minds: Helping You Adapt to the Iterative Nature of Improvement

At Parallel Minds, we fully grasp the iterative nature of improvement and understand the need to revisit maps as your business and the tech around it evolves. Our list of optimizations take into account the size and nature of your business and our customized VSM solutions bridge the gap between business ambitions as well as operational potential and achievable states.

Get in touch today and our team will help your business map its way to a leaner and more successful state.

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Global Complaint Management System (GCMS): Tech-Enabled and Across Borders

Global Complaint Management System (GCMS): Tech-Enabled and Across Borders

In today’s interconnected world, a Global Complaint Management System (GCMS) is a solution for providing seamless customer support across borders. With its consolidated platform, multichannel intake, and extensive analytics, a GCMS offers timely resolution, proactive quality control, and brand protection.

In an optimally interconnected world where the existence of borders can no longer be used as an excuse for customer service and redressal delays, a Global Complaint Management System (GCMS) enables a business to access and act upon an entire complaint management system for their global clientele.

Maintaining a steady customer relationship by never allowing physical distances to come in the way of client satisfaction, protecting brand reputation through prompt redressal, or even ensuring that the brand follows all regulatory compliances across different regions, a dependable GCMS delivers solutions to satisfy every norm.

Global Complaint Management System (GCMS): A Quick Intro

Global Complaint Management System (GCMS): A centralized software platform with access to all associated business processes, a GCMS equips a business with the ability to receive complaints, track and analyze their progress, and resolve them from an existing worldwide customer base in a well-planned, consistent, and optimal manner.

A GCMS covers a wider range of services and is not restricted to product defects alone. It encompasses the entire spectrum, from service complaints and billing issues to ethical grievances and concerns on social media.

Since it is a global platform, a dependable GCMS must be built to withstand challenges such as multiple languages, and wide-ranging regulatory and consumer protection laws across different markets and deliver accordingly.

Where Traditional Approaches Fall Short

When going global, companies sometimes continue to rely on their traditional complaint management systems and believe a fragmented approach works best. Here’s where this entire plan goes wrong:

Isolated Communication and Knowledge Reservoirs: In the case of a complaint management system, the communication reservoir built over time is an invaluable resource that helps a business access information. With the traditional, broken-down approach, local email inboxes, spreadsheets, and desktop systems carry isolated bits of info and fail to gain knowledge from the existing information and patterns that exist with the help of cross-regional visibility.

Inconsistency in Complaint Handling: Teams working from different countries and regions handling the same kind of complaints in myriad ways lead to variable customer experiences and unpredictable customer satisfaction metrics.

Risk of Non-Compliance: In a global market, consumer protection laws, compliance, and other regulatory nuances vary. In the absence of a centralized system, there’s a constant risk of non-compliance and subsequent fines where regulatory oversights caused by isolated environments cause potentially risky blind spots.

Missing Out on Valuable Data Insights: Customer complaints hold invaluable knowledge chunks to help a business improve. From product irregularities and service bottlenecks to competitive comparisons and emerging demands, there’s so much to learn. A siloed approach takes away this advantage and prevents a business from accessing valuable insights.

Centralized Cloud-Based GCMS: Essential Features of a Global Business Solution

Multichannel Intake: Web forms on a business site offer secure, customized forms for easy complaints. Dedicated email addresses with functions like automated forwarding are part of the system as soon as a complaint is received. Integrated call center systems with the ability to log in call details manually for documentation. And social media monitoring to extract actionable case studies and concerns. All these elements come together to form a multichannel intake platform.

Centralized Case Management: Efficient complaint categorization allows for a clear tagging and classification exercise to keep track of different classes of complaints. An automated system enables the escalation of urgent complaints and issues while just as efficiently diverting others to relevant teams and processes. Assignment protocol based on set rules allows for optimal distribution based on issue, region, department, or product. Timely alerts keep stakeholders updated on the progress and resolution status through various stages.

Workflow Automation: Standard procedures make for customizable, well-planned workflows for every complaint type and enable teams to follow clear procedures for their prompt and efficient resolution. Knowledge-based aggregation allows teams to access relevant information sought from past complaints and similar resolutions. Automatic response templates introduce consistency to communication and provide complainants with quick acknowledgment receipts, and updates. They also help set up a systematic flow of information.

Security and Accessibility: Role-based access codes offer better control based on different employee levels. A cloud-based security system allows for anywhere access while following proper protocol via secure authorization, eventually assisting enhanced collaboration. The data encryption protocol adheres to strict data protection regulations, allowing businesses to function smoothly in various regions while meeting their security requirements efficiently.

Data Analytics and Reporting: Customizable dashboards offer real-time peeks into complaint numbers, trends, average resolution windows, and other statistics with a parameter-wise breakdown. AI and machine learning enable pattern identification to resolve complaints more efficiently and with minimal resource expenditure. Automated regulatory compliance reports sent out to relevant agencies ensure responsiveness while following regulatory laws. Finally, with the help of sentiment analysis, responses to complaints can now gauge dissatisfaction and work out resolutions and communications accordingly.

Advantages of a GCMS

Elevated Levels of Customer Satisfaction: Customers who have already had a negative experience with a product greatly appreciate quick and effective communication and resolution. A dependable GCMS helps your business deliver an optimal complaint resolution process that boosts customer loyalty.

Instead of generic responses, a GCMS provides high levels of personalization so that support representatives and even automated responses can offer tailored responses and resolutions depending on the existing complaint history. This makes a customer feel valued.

Even in the case of an unhappy customer, responsiveness and dedicated resolution show that a company is willing to accept its shortcomings and spend its resources on making up for them. This can convert even a disgruntled customer.

Robust Regulatory Compliance: A GCMS enables customized alignment with compliance frameworks and helps a business meet specific industry regulations concerning complaint management, resolution timelines, and other similar parameters.

In the case of inquiries from a regulatory agency, a GCMS can present detailed records and create a defensible audit trail with proper outlines of every complaint lifecycle.

Most importantly, a GCMS maintains international standards in terms of compliance and regulations, even in regions where robust laws are still in the formation stages. This ensures that the business follows an ethical path, irrespective of region or country.

Proactive Quality Control: With single complaints, it becomes difficult to identify a pattern. However, when analytics tools in a GCMS study the magnitude of complaints, they can detect a pattern that comes in handy when hunting down a permanent resolution.

Targeting root causes and introducing improvements results in preemptive action that prevents further complaints, reduces warranty and service costs, and, in extreme scenarios, prevents product recalls and lost clientele.

Complaints also include suggestions for improvements and requests for new features. Accessing this information with the help of a GCMS enables a business to introduce new product developments and leverage the advantage of firsthand information from its customer base.

Data-Driven Actions: While sales and operational data offer their share of information, data retrieved from customer complaints gives deeper insights into product preferences, pain points, competitive comparisons, and other parameters. A GCMS enables the accumulation of all these relevant data points.

A GCMS also maps disproportionate complaints that flag a particularly troublesome product line, enabling a business to halt production until existing glitches in quality or operations are resolved through R&D or testing.

GCMS solutions also process the varying sentiments behind customer complaints, gauging their intensity and highlighting specific complaints for personal communication and resolution. This helps customer service teams identify special cases and provide resolutions accordingly.

Brand Protection: A GCMS serves as an early warning system by highlighting negative emotions in complaints, monitoring social media reactions, and providing an overview of customer behavior. This enables a business to provide quick resolutions and introduce damage-control measures when an incident threatens to go viral.

As a centralized source of information, a GCMS can also identify misinformation and highlight inaccurate news or complaints on the internet. A business can then contribute to the narrative and set the record straight before serious damage is done.

Finally, proactive complaint resolutions and elevated levels of customer service enable a business to tackle criticism with positivity and counter market negativity in time. This reputation management method is respectable and ethical.

GCMS: The Parallel Minds Approach

At Parallel Minds, we are prepared to make the existing Global Complaint Management System framework even more robust and future-ready. Whether it is omnichannel complaint submissions via voice chats or chatbots, AI-powered classification and routing of complaints, or the use of AI models to predict market trends and issues, our teams are already preparing for the future. With us on your side, you can always depend on a robust GCMS solution, without any room for complaints!

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Digital Twin Technology: Transforming the Manufacturing Sector

Digital Twin Technology: Transforming the Manufacturing Sector

Digitization is rapidly transforming the manufacturing sector, with even the most traditional processes undergoing comprehensive changes to match the new norms of a digitally woke industry. One of the technologies that has been making headlines and impact in equal measure is Digital Twin Technology.

Creating virtual avatars of different components and structures of a manufacturing process from physical assets to systems, the tool is increasingly turning out to be the solution businesses were on the hunt for to revolutionize their manufacturing blueprints.

At Parallel Minds, we’ve been exploring the technology since its early stages and have always been impressed with how it can leverage every digitization advantage and transform any manufacturing process into a high-performing environment.

Here’s a lowdown on everything you wanted to know about Digital Twin Technology and a quick peek into how its powers are indeed what everyone is making them out to be!

Understanding a Digital Twin

Several components, systems, and processes make up a manufacturing process. There are machines involved, products being developed, and processes underway across the board. A digital twin is a virtual avatar or representation of all these elements that leverages the magic of simulation with the help of real-time data to create a mirror of every element to help track performance and gain valuable insights.

The true power of this technology lies in its ability to show how tweaks and changes you make in a process or product will play out, without suffering the consequences of errored judgments or experiments. These developments in the digital world can then be further fine tuned and replicated in a real manufacturing environment to gain maximum mileage and performance.

Core Components of Digital Twin Tech

Physical Avatar: This is the physical, real-world entity that the digital twin is developed to replicate and can be any component across the manufacturing drawing board – from machines and products to a departmental floor or even the entire manufacturing cycle.

Data Gathering: Data acquisition is carried out by different physical components like sensors and digital components that gather real-time data sets from the physical avatar. These data sets include different parameters such as operational efficiency, performance statistics, sustainability aspects, and others.

Digital Avatar: The virtual or digital avatar or representation is the result of the behind-the-scenes workings of 3D modeling software and is a comprehensively digitized version of the physical representation.

Analytics Driver: The analytics driver or engine’s key responsibility is the real-time analysis of the gathered data and comparisons with historical data to create digital patterns and insights that identify gaps in the system and highlight key areas for performance enhancement.

User Interface: A user-friendly program that serves as the interface for studying developed patterns and gathered insights and doubles up as the simulated environment where data and process experiments may be carried out in the digital form.

Applications of Digital Twin Technology in Manufacturing

Product Design & Development: The technology can perform digital tests of improved prototypes of existing products or even experimental products to pinpoint issues and introduce improvements. In the practical manufacturing environment, the tech can track the performance of a product to determine maintenance and service cycles and provide historical data for improvements.

Production Planning & Scheduling: A digital twin can simulate various production scenarios to help managers identify gaps and optimize scheduling and improve resource distribution while identifying obstructions and highlighting inefficiencies in the process. Even for entire factory and department floors, a digital twin can create a detailed blueprint to streamline production.

Predictive Maintenance: In addition to carefully identifying red flags that indicate potential breakdowns, a digital twin can also create and improve maintenance schedules to accommodate these repairs. They can directly contribute to optimized operations and thus, reduction in downtime and subsequent losses.

Quality Control & Improvements: A digital twin’s ability to create simulations in a virtual environment and features such as sensor-tracking etc. make it the perfect monitoring device for identifying errors and deficiencies in production processes and operations. It can also automate the quality control and inspection process to optimize monitoring and consistency.

Supply Chain Efficiency: The technology can transform supply chain management blueprints by generating accurate tracking data and simulations of possible supply chain scenarios to highlight potential disruptions and suggest alternative solutions. It can serve as a real-time yet virtual platform for any collaborative experiments between the manufacturing unit, vendors, and logistics suppliers.

Advantages of Digital Twin Technology in Manufacturing

Enhanced Operational Efficiency: With real-time monitoring and analysis of equipment status, forecasting of possible breakdowns, and features such as predictive scheduling of maintenance and service appointments kick in, the entire operation becomes a lot more efficient with reduced downtimes and delays. Digital twins also save manufacturing cycles from abrupt shutdowns by anticipating failures and glitches in the operational cycle.

Optimized Resource Distribution: Resource allocation can now be optimized with the help of accurate data insights, possible scenarios can be simulated to optimize efficiency across the board, and even hidden bottlenecks can quickly be uncovered to improve overall performance. All this not only results in improved production numbers but also streamlines resource allocation and costs.

Improved Product Quality: When operational efficiency is improved, this automatically reflects on the quality of the manufactured product. Digital twins identify possible flaws in the product blueprint in a simulated environment while also monitoring product quality in real-time. The technology promotes consistency in product quality and gathers essential data to highlight potential improvements and red flag even minute yet consequential flaws.

Constant Innovation: The long-term success of a product manufacturing line depends heavily on the process’s ability to introduce constant innovation to the product. With its rapid prototyping abilities and digital testing facilities, a digital twin can create virtual environments for the engineering, development, testing, and application of products. This leads to increased collaboration, quicker innovation cycles, and rigorous experimentations for improvement. All this adds up to a high-energy product improvement environment that focuses heavily on constant innovation.

An Efficient Supply Chain: A digital twin displays with accuracy a host of real-time data insights from the manufacturing process and product improvement cycles while also allowing ready access to data points from the supply chain. The tech can provide valuable insights into disruptions in the supply chain, forecast potential delays, and suggest improved patterns to optimize management. This leads to improved lead time, timely alerts, and optimized resource and cost distribution.

Improved Customer Satisfaction: Every business aims for the ultimate proof of a great manufacturing and product evolution blueprint – customer satisfaction. A digital twin offers you real-time insights into product feedback, keeps you in the loop while highlighting potentially crucial information and bytes, and at the same time, relaying suggestions to introduce improvements. At every juncture, a digital twin also connects the dots between usage patterns and customer complaints and glitches in the manufacturing process, further running quick simulations to lay out dependable solutions.

Sustainability Quotient: Along with the operational benefits it offers, a digital twin can also improve the sustainability quotient of a manufacturing process. In making processes more efficient, allocating resources more responsibly, and identifying avenues where sustainability can be enhanced, a digital twin contributes substantially to the creation of an environment-friendly manufacturing cycle. Energy efficiency is another byproduct that not only saves money but also reduces environmental damage.

At Parallel Minds, we understand how even these comprehensive insights only scratch the surface of what digital twin technology can do for your manufacturing business. Get in touch with our team today and let’s explore more.

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