The most impressive part about manufacturing companies joining the fight against COVID-19

It's impossible to go online right now and not see a post or an article about the "new challenges of business" as we face the work environment that has come about in the last 4-6 weeks with the Novel Coronavirus. For most that are reading this in the technology space, we're lucky that the biggest challenge we've had to endure is handled in one of the 5M posts about "being productive while working remotely". Personally i am thankful every day that I am still working. As a first generation college graduate, many in my family are not so lucky.

With the understanding that our problems are relative, there is a massive challenge ahead for any company that produces material goods for their customers. All of these companies are striving to ensure the health and safety of their employees, while also reacting to shifting supply chains impacting all parts of logistics - with some companies, in a matter of days and weeks, completely changing the products coming off of their production lines. Be it as a result of good will, the opportunity for good press, or federal/state legislation - no matter what the reason, what these companies are doing is nothing short of an operational miracle.

Even before a global pandemic, production companies were considering how to respond to new sources of supply and shifting end user demand - and thinking of ways to leverage digital capabilities to be flexible and provide business resilience when operating in uncharted territory. This "Digital Transformation" has been slow going in manufacturing, as most companies in this space have been around for a long time - and enhancing existing legacy processes, systems, and machinery with new digital tools can be a larger under taking than building a new digitally enabled facility from the ground up.

This crisis has forced companies to pivot quickly, and get past some of the challenges that have held back this transition to the new digital world - understanding the true business value of digital solutions, incentive's for change, organizational and operational cultural transformation needed, and of course robust data and IT infrastructure. Just the last challenge alone has forced a massive undertaking by organizations - as companies have existing systems (ERP's) and processes (Material/Inventory Movement) that have been built and designed for their standard products. The inventory and material management process for things like COVID Tests, N95 Masks, respirators and ventilators is so different than other pharmaceutical, medical, and consumer goods that most of these existing systems are almost unusable, forcing most of these large companies to make this transition manually and in spreadsheets! The speed by which they have answered the bell and delivered on their promises is incredibly impressive when that is considered - and the reason for the title of this article.

This forced rapid transformation is impacting every company differently, but for those making this transition in real time to match the demand for these critical products that are going to help America get through this crisis - we are seeing some rather incredible innovation. We have some clients and partners leveraging our platform to generate custom enterprise scale applications built for industry, with out writing any code or setting up any infrastructure. With our existing Manufacturing App Templates, customers are generating and rapidly customizing applications that they will run temporarily leveraging our cloud based SaaS architecture, giving them insight to key Manufacturing metrics with out having to completely transition existing systems. Customers are leveraging apps to track:

• Stock to Sales Ratio
• Weeks on Hand
• Inventory Turn Over rate
• Backorder Rate
• Time To receive
• Put Away Time
• On-Time Orders
• Material Consumption
• Stock On Hand
• Asset Utilization
• Cycle Time
• Labor Usage
• CDC Processes: N95 Respirator Supply Check, Facility Cleaning Inspection, PUI & Case Reporting

What's most impressive to see is that this rapid transformation has proven to a lot of organizations that they do have the capability to modernize legacy processes with new software development approaches that they hadn't thought of in the past. For those companies joining in the fight, as well as those that are considering their own digital flexibility and resiliency coming out of this crisis - simplifying the generation of mission critical applications that drive productivity will be a key first step in the new road to digital transformation.

Please join us on our webinar on April 28th at 10am PST to learn how we can partner with your organization quickly. Streamlining your internal business productivity application development and deployment process with Pillir's cloud based low-code EdgeReady Cloud will allow you to extend your enterprise resource planning platform to edge use cases for any device in any connectivity landscape with out writing code or setting up expensive infrastructure. Our customers will be coming out of the crisis thinking of ways to leverage sensors, IoT, blockchain, Big Data, advanced analytics, artificial intelligence, AR/VR, and RPA because the challenges of digitizing their manufacturing business processes will be exponentially simpler and faster with Pillir. Join us for our webinar or visit us at www.pillir.io to learn more!