The Operations1 Blog

Amidst the rapidly evolving manufacturing landscape, Operations1 has secured a significant position in the prestigious Gartner Hype Cycle for Manufacturing Operations Strategy, 2023. As this trend gains momentum, with 5% to 20% market penetration, signaling a promising adolescence stage.

Digitalization has greatly changed the business world in recent years, emphasizing the need for a modern, networked IT landscape. Companies are looking for efficient solutions to optimize their workflows and better support their employees.

In this context, the introduction of Connected Worker platforms in a Software as a Service (SaaS) approach, is becoming increasingly important.

When it comes to change management, many people react with resistance and fear of change. Yet change management is often the key to a company's success and satisfied employees. As Head of Customer Success at Operations1, Rafael Koch has been involved in many change management processes. In this interview, he reveals the secret of successful change management and why it is so important to involve employees.

Companies that believe that the only chance of digitization lies in finally getting rid of the mountains of documents are thinking too short of the issue. Digital processes are just the tip of the iceberg, as Stefan Philipp knows. The Head of Solutions at Operations1 and his team have already successfully supported many companies on their way toward connected work. In this interview, he provides in-depth insights into how networked working can optimize processes to such an extent that productivity and employee satisfaction increase significantly and six-figure sums can be saved at the same time.

The fear that technology will curtail the frontline worker's job as it develops is widespread. However, if the requirement profile of operational employees shifts more towards conceptual activities in the coming decades, this fear is unfounded.

Bernd Hausler, Managing Director at ifm, the leading supplier of innovative automation technology, takes the clear view in an interview with CEO and Co-Founder Benjamin Brockmann: "For me, people will remain the focal point in production in the future."

The shortage of skilled workers is one of the greatest challenges facing the manufacturing industry. It is not just a question of knowledge that is lost with the retiring experienced workforce, but also serious consequences such as declining productivity. What has been missing so far is a consistent digitization strategy that embeds the operational employee in a comprehensive digital system of connectivity.

A Connected Worker Platform represents such a solution approach, because it offers three central levers that sustainably protect against a shortage of skilled workers: knowledge retention, productivity enhancement, and employee retention.

Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) is a comprehensive maintenance concept to enable a trouble-free production system. In our detailed TPM guide, we explain the complex term and its history, explain the different building blocks of TPM, go into the advantages and disadvantages of the method using examples, and illustrate the introduction. In the end, it becomes clear that companies that want to move with the times cannot avoid digital TPM.

A Connected Worker Platform represents a new category of technology that puts people at the center of the production environment. In this compact guide, you will learn why this is important, how you can proceed to implement a Connected Worker Platform, and what results you can expect.

The connection of operational employees has arrived on the agenda of international executives of manufacturing companies. Pioneers can already measure enormous successes, while the majority of companies are still at the stage of paper, ERP interfaces on the shopfloor and fragmented in-house developments.

On 10 and 11 May 2022, we as Operations1 were nominated as one of the top 5 start-ups in the field of production and were thus able to engage in an exchange with many executives from Germany's most innovative factories. What was particularly motivating about this was that instead of focusing exclusively on the short-term challenges in global supply chains, the focus was particularly on the topics of sustainability, value orientation and digitalisation.

We changed our brand from cioplenu to Operations1. Our goal is to support operational employees worldwide in their daily work! Therefore, we have decided to manage the software and our team under Operations1 to firmly anchor this ambition in our brand as well.

Buzzwords like Industry 4.0 or Smart Factory are on everyone's lips. Most manufacturing companies are already investing heavily in digitization. However, this often creates data silos and increases complexity for operational employees.

Adaptive Process Execution Software helps to think holistically about the production process, to focus on the operational employee and to network the organization.

There are many reasons for opening a new production site or relocating production. What is always required, is to transfer existing knowledge to the new location as part of knowledge management. We show you how.

The HSSE area includes extensive guidelines and processes that require strict compliance. However, compliance auditing is often done in paper form. Adaptive Process Execution Software provides HSSE teams with a real alternative. We show how.

Companies strive to continuously improve their organizational structures, processes and operations. The basic principle of the "Continuous Improvement Process" is often used for this purpose.

Process optimization can, for example, refer to increasing quality, reducing lead times or lowering costs.

Most manufacturing companies have already recognized that there is no alternative to digitizing production. It is therefore all the more surprising that the clipboard has still not been banned from the shopfloor and that operational employees still work with paper-based process descriptions.

Yet digital documentation has invaluable advantages. Easy drag-and-drop creation and customization of digital documentation and the ability to provide multilingual instructions are just two of them. Our blog post sheds light on others.

Efficient production has never been more difficult, especially when faced with the constant pressure to innovate quickly and deliver ever greater value to customers. Having the right information in the right place at the right time has never been more important. That's why digital manufacturing assembly instructions, as opposed to their paper-based counterparts, play a critical role in today's manufacturing environment.

Digital work instructions help manage increasing product complexity and make your employees' day-to-day work easier. Growing demands for product customization and shortening production cycles are among the biggest challenges in modern manufacturing. At the same time, quality control remains as important as ever, and sacrificing one for the other is neither sustainable nor profitable.

Writing work instructions is cumbersome. We understand that. But we would still like to take up the cudgels for them. Comprehensible step-by-step instructions not only help to carry out activities correctly. The creation of work instructions is an underestimated, value-adding process: processes are critically analyzed and further developed in the process. That's why we don't just want to give you tips on how to write really good work instructions. We will show you the potential that writing them holds for industrial companies. Read on to find out how you can leverage this potential. Or, jump straight to the content and style of the perfect work instruction.

Many companies still use paper-based work instructions. Due to the increasing complexity of process documentation, this approach is inefficient and outdated. Version chaos and time expenditure are only two uneconomical consequences. We highlight four others.

The importance of high-quality work instructions is constantly increasing. In times of a shortage of skilled workers, small batch sizes and varied productions, a precise work instruction is the gold of the 21st century. Find out here how to create a professional work instruction and what you have to pay attention to.

Offering customers a wide range of variants will not be a differentiating feature in perspective, but a standard that must also be taken into account operationally in assembly processes, testing processes and other workflows. As the number of variants increases, a suitable data structure becomes more and more important.

The checklist in production helps to carry out various processes. It supports workers in the maintenance of machines, in the review of quality targets and in the incoming goods inspection. Read more on how to optimize your checklist creation.

As a specific form of inspection sheet, the check sheet is an established method for evaluating attributive inspections. The quality control check is based on the number of failures, since no measured values for defective parts are available with the static defect card.

Read here how you can make the way from the excel check sheet to a powerful quality tool.

New employees are often not productive for weeks at the beginning, the training takes a lot of time and personnel resources. To ensure that employees are trained more quickly and can take on tasks independently at an earlier stage, training by means of integrated software is suitable. Self-learning in particular can help to bring employees on board more efficiently.

Every device, every machine and every system must be tested regularly: whether cordless screwdrivers, ventilation systems or complex production machines. In addition to accurate inspections, the documentation of the test results is also extremely relevant. Digital inspection protocols are the optimal basis for legally compliant documentation. Read more ...