Traceability improvement of material flow through digitalization in metal industry company

Abstract

In competitive reality of the industrial customer’s requirements from suppliers the highest possible levels of quality, low pricing and compliance to the sustainability standards. This leads suppliers to the development of analytical systems to control these various aspects to keep the completive advantages in the business area. However, control over these aspects directly dependent on the performance of different departments and stakeholders leading companies to gather extensive amounts of operational data. At this moment commissioner has decided that digital traceability could become solution for the constant development and relevancy in market. There has been analyzed operations and current traceability procedures of the metal parts manufacturer production division. The main objective of the study is to identify the requirements of key stakeholders to develop a relevant and functioning traceability that ensures long-term relevance and improves the information flow of the end-to-end process. A qualitative research method was carried out in which an extensive list of different working standards, instructions and process descriptions were analyzed. The observations identified various bottlenecks and process stages that led to loss of control over the flow of information. The main reasons were poor communication channels with external parties, errors and inaccuracies caused by human error, lack of sufficient planning of traceability procedures for certain types of products. A crucial aspect of the study was the interviews with key stakeholders, which provided a clear understanding of potential solutions. Looking at the problems from different perspectives of quality, IT, customer and subcontractor formed an extensive list of requirements for the critical information to be collected by the system, the processes to be developed for the successful operation of the system and the utilization of collected data by the traceability system. In outcome there was designed a flow chart with current and suggested processes for different problematic products from traceability perspective. There has been suggested changes in the processes with excessive manual input developing it with barcode system simplifying and automating key areas for traceability. Furthermore, identified potential development possibilities of current web-based ERP automating information data exchange with external parties. As a result, the commissioner was advised to continually monitor process bottlenecks and develop extended subcontractor responsibility for traceability of products under their operations.