We interviewed one of our customers in the commercial green energy industry and here’s what they had to say.

Paper travellers are the norm whether its process instructions or quality sheets for data capture. Created in Word or Excel, routed around the relevant departments for sign off and then printed. These critical documents form part a manufacturing / production order pack and are issued to the shop floor.

Large binders are put together where printed updates are applied and the revision history is kept up to date for compliance. When a production order runs, the manufacturing order reference is applied to the traveller paperwork (build sheets & quality data capture sheets) and the operators follow the build sheets (Or more likely reference them when changes have been applied to the process) and they write in the quality data on the paper.

The quality data sheets are then be scanned for record keeping purposes, but the data is flat, other than to read from the paper once you have spent hours problem solving.  

The data is a record in time, not searchable, not reportable, chartable and there has been, understandably as it’s paper a lack of systemised quality control or validation in the process for say upper or lower limits.

The problem with using paper for production & quality processes.

Process, quality & inspection are all impacted with the use of paper.
Large binders containing updates per production run are scanned for quality & record keeping but with no data extraction.

Troubleshooting is very challenging & time consuming & you can often spend hours, and not surprising when you can have 100’s of data sheets with quality and inspection data to sift through. For high value, high complexity configured to order products electronic build and data capture brings many advantages, a number of which are highlighted below.

Unfortunately there is a hesitancy to invest.