DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION
Consul Product Management Internship is a voluntary program targeted at helping small businesses reach new goals. Teams of students are formed and with the guidance of professional mentors (Ebay, Matrix) the teams go through a deep dive into the business and create a specification for a digital solution that suits the business's needs.
FOOD FACTORY, ATAROT
120 employees in low season - 300 employees in high season
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The factory had just purchased a flour mill to increase its independence and was looking for a digital solution to support this growth.
END-TO-END UNDERSTANDING
Several interview rounds with key employees helped us understand the full process: from the moment an order was made (and before) to the moment it was shipped to the buyer.
STOCK: The point of pain
The factory needs to make sure it always has enough ingredients to keep producing and yet make sure ingredients don't sit for too long in the warehouse and go bad. This delicate balance turned to be a challenge.
COMMUNICATION DEEP DIVE
In order to follow the documentation process of stocks' incoming and outgoing we mapped out how the information about the different processes is transferred within the factory between the relevant position holders.
KEY BARRIERS
1. Factory information was transferred in hallway conversations, texts and emails between two parties with no documentation.
2. The few employees that had documentation systems of their own were the only ones with access and knowledge of it.
3. A lot of day to day processes were documented by factory workers in thick folders which were not opened unless there was a problem.
THE SOLUTION: A digital system that follows the course of the stock
KEY EMPLOYEE REACTIONS
The reactions of employees presented with the solution were varied. Some employees were enthusiastic about the accurate and automatic processes they could rely on while other employees were not as enthusiastic about having information previously uniquely accessed by themselves, now available to other functions in the factory.
PRODUCT SPEC
The factory manager was excited about the possibilities of the new system.
Accordingly we reached our final involvement with the factory by creating a specification for the required system.
