Critical Manufacturing: From White Board to App in 8 Weeks
Saturday, May 22, 2021
Challenge
MaxUS Operations, a contract packaging firm based in the Midwest, faced scalability challenges as it expanded its operations. As the company transitioned to a 24/7 schedule and opened new facilities outside the Midwest, its existing warehouse floor technology struggled to keep up. The packaging firm dealt with process inefficiencies and a lack of visibility into business operations, hindering its ability to scale. Warehouse employees manually tracked essential business data using whiteboards, paper documents, and Excel spreadsheets. The information was disjointed, limiting reporting capabilities and negatively impacting employee productivity. Warehouse workers struggled to obtain critical information to complete their shifts, including their tasks for the day, production line issue alerts, and order scheduling.
“With the organization of data and the ability to add, change, and move processes around, we can make our systems work in the best way possible for our teams.”
— Director of Engineering
Solution
With Macedon as their expert technology partner, MaxUS leveraged Appian’s low-code platform to digitize key warehouse processes and increase visibility into operations. The company’s first critical task was to eliminate its reliance on paper forms, whiteboards, and Excel documents for core business functions. The Macedon team collaborated with business leaders to develop informative dashboards for employees that unified their shift data and key metrics into a single digital truth source. By consolidating this previously disjointed data into a single, easily accessible system, workers instantly obtained essential information to complete their work.
With their new unified system, the company’s next endeavor was to automate data collection on the warehouse floor. The Macedon team built an application for production line workers that tracked key metrics, purchase orders, and inventory movements to enable real-time tracking. The development team embedded this application into the workers’ barcode scanners and wall-mounted tablets, enabling warehouse tools to track data automatically as employees perform their jobs.
Result
Macedon Technologies built, tested, and deployed the MaxUS Operations solution in a short eight weeks. The Macedon team worked under a tight schedule to release the application for the firm’s scheduled shift to 24/7 operations. Once MaxUS Operations launched the app, warehouse personnel reported an immediate decrease in manual tasks. Instead of keying crucial information into Excel documents, erasing and redrawing diagrams on whiteboards, and filing paperwork, employees now enter and obtain information through a single digital system. Appian does the heavy lifting and frees up employees to perform higher-value tasks, saving workers hours of unproductive work, and significantly reducing business costs.
With improved data tracking, managers now access accurate, real-time reporting on key performance indicators, receive instant production issue alerts, enhance operational visibility, and enable quick problem resolution. Leaders at MaxUS have been so satisfied with the results from their first Appian application that they have expanded upon its success by partnering with Macedon to develop a second solution to track quotes throughout the sales process. In the future, leaders plan to grow their warehouse management system and create a customer portal. Appian is now core to the business’s value chain and is a competitive advantage in their market.
Scaled up 24/7 operations at multiple locations with digitized warehouse processes
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