Manufacturers: Gain the Digital Transformation Lead with M-Files

Today’s manufacturing environment is as competitive as ever, and many companies are looking for any edge they can get to gain market share and retain existing customer relationships. The manufacturing sector has been hit hard by the latest labor shortage, with effects felt on both the factory floor and in the back office. Making due with the tight labor market means executives and factory managers must increase worker productivity while minimizing waste, all while keeping up with industry-wide trends toward “digital transformation”. Given that 73% of workers spend 1-3 hours a day finding information or a particular document, these two tasks are not unrelated. Upgrading your information management and helping your employees, both on the floor and in the office, find the information to do their jobs will drastically increase their productivity. Here is how M-Files can help.

M-Files is a document management platform that helps organizations keep documents and other information organized and secure. The user’s experience is paramount – documents are categorized into classes defined according to your company’s needs, and relationships between documents can be explored by the user to quickly find the information they need to do their job. Security and document permissions can be set on whole classes of documents, or set according to company-defined properties, ensuring that you company’s existing security policies are properly followed. Furthermore, workflows can be set up that automatically assign or otherwise set properties on your documents, effectively translating and streamlining your company’s manual processes into the M-Files platform.

Over the course of normal business operations, your company will produce many different types of documents, and M-Files can easily track and organize them all. Sales orders, SOPs, Purchase Orders, you name it! How many hours does your floor employees waste searching for training documents or SOPs? In M-Files, your SOPs will be categorized according to the SOP class, and if a user has permissions to view them, these documents will be just a few mouse clicks away. How many hours are wasted by engineers approving and emailing SOPs back and forth? Your SOPs or any other controlled documents can go through an approval workflow, where only users with edit permissions can update the document and assign it to others. Does your back-office workers spend hours sifting and searching through network folders containing sales and purchase orders? In M-Files, these will be searchable by keywords, properties, vendors and suppliers, and really any property you can think of that characterizes these documents at your company.

In addition to handling documents, M-Files is an excellent store of non-document information. Manufacturer’s projects, clients, deals, or even capital assets can be stored as objects inside of M-Files. Does your company have SOP documents or other artifacts that are generated as a part of a project? Store your projects in M-Files and link these documents to your project with just a few mouse clicks. Does your deals go through a pre-sale, approval, and execution process? Add your deals to M-Files and build a workflow to handle sign-offs and to organize them according to their current status. Does your capital assets require yearly reviews for tax or financial auditing? With your capital assets tracked in M-Files, you can set a review date on each M-Files object and build out a workflow that automatically assigns the capital asset to a user when the review date arrives, and even send the user an email notifying them of the review!

M-Files recognizes that each company is different, and they all have existing stores of information that are oftentimes siloed away from each other. Manufacturers may have to juggle between their CRM, PDM, or ERP systems, and while M-Files can help centralize information, these systems may still serve an essential operational role. Is your company hesitant about a full migration into a new system? M-Files can easily connect to external information sources, like network folders or databases. Information can still “live” in your legacy systems, while being fully viewable and searchable from inside of M-Files. If your existing system does not have a database, there is a rich ecosystem of connectors developed by M-Files and others that can pull information from a wide range of third-party applications.

In today’s business climate, reliance on the old ways of information management can be detrimental to the success of your company. And with pressure to increase worker productivity, your company cannot afford to expend wasted effort tracking down the information your employees need to do their jobs. Reach out to TEAM IM today and let us show you how you can gain a competitive edge with M-Files and modern document management!