Business use case (NOI management)

This Business Use Case outlines how the adoption of NotifyMe may be beneficial for a Plant owner, EPC contractor or manufacturer (“Company” in this example scenario), and addresses current business concerns, the benefits, the organizational impact and the justifications of the adoption project.

This Business Use Case is meant to serve as a resource for project managers, quality managers and procurement specialists who would like to establish and deploy strategies to centralize their company information flow and add automation to their working processes as related to inspection and NOIs, .

Issue

In this example Business Use Case, the process of managing Notifications of Inspections (NOIs) on projects is currently managed manually, and is time-consuming, sporadic and uncoordinated. Customers, inspection bodies and suppliers have no visibility of the Company's inspection management processes, and a constant effort is required to keep everyone engaged.

Also, reporting and KPIs are not reliable due to lack of accurate historical data concerning the inspections planned or carried out and the inspection results. This makes it difficult to evaluate the suppliers reliability and quality performance. There is no central control for NOIs and no common reporting of KPIs/status for the different business units.

The follow-up of supplier nonconformances and issues resulting from the inspections is not efficient in collecting information, planning corrective actions and ensuring they are completed on time.

Problem Statement

In this example Business Use Case, the Company relies upon a manual approach to plan and coordinate the quality inspection at the suppliers. As the number of employees grows, so does the burden placed upon headquarters to effectively manage the inspection activities at acceptable levels. Employees must currently enter data manually into Excel spreadsheets with regard to inspections schedule and results, and to NRCs.

This places a large burden on managers who must extract reports and KPIs from these spreadsheets, and balance these activities with their day to day billable tasks. All weekly and monthly reports must be generated manually which allows for a high probability of error and require significant amounts of time. These manual tasks further add to the burden and expense of the Company.

Anticipated Outcomes

Moving to a centralized collaboration platform will enable the Company to manage their inspection, NOI and supplier nonconformances management functions in a seamless and consolidated manner.

This technology upgrade will enable a timely and accurate processing of NOIs, minimize the human errors related to uncoordinated planning of the inspection activities, and automate closed-loop Nonconformances and corrective action plans.

NotifyMe will replace the existing system in a phased implementation approach.

This adoption project will result in :

• real-time and accurate reporting with regards to inspection and supplier nonconformances management

• greater efficiency of day to day operations and reporting as a result of providing employees with standardized processes and information updated in real-time

• improved customer experience as a result of providing customers with streamlined communication and active interaction with the Company processes

• reduced Cost of Poor Quality as a result of providing suppliers with streamlined communication and automated closed-loop Nonconformances and corrective action plans.

The customer success team, along with the support and implementation team of NotifyMe will be directly involved in the implementation and will provide guidance and support to facilitate smooth execution of the project.

The adoption will be completed once the new system is operational and the actual manual methodology is no longer in use.

Recommendation

NotifyMe allows the Company to meet the corporate objectives of continuously improving efficiency, reducing costs, and capitalizing on technology.

The adoption of NotifyMe will methodically migrate the processes and functions to a web-based platform in order to preserve process integrity and allow adequate time to train all employees and managers on their responsibilities and respective functions.

The software is responsive and accessible anywhere securely, via any connected device, and can be integrated with the other current IT systems using the APIs provided.

Some of the ways that the adoption of NotifyMe will achieve its desired results are:

• Standardize the inspection management workflow

• Increase process efficiency

• Real-time data collection

• Automatize recurrent working activities

• Improve information flow throughout the supply chain

• Reduce mistakes due to miscommunication

• Enable vendors, inspection bodies and customers to directly take part in Company’s inspection processes

Also, it will provide:

• Central control of NOIs and full traceability of activities

• Ability to run reports for KPIs

• Improved Customer experience

Organizational Impact

The adoption of the software will impact the Company’s organization in several ways. The following provides a high-level explanation of how the organization tools, processes, and roles and responsibilities will be affected as a result of the adoption of NotifyMe:

Tools: the existing Excel spreadsheets will be phased out completely as NotifyMe is stood up and becomes operational. This will require training employees on the NotifyMe tools and their use in support of other organizational tools.

Processes: with the adoption of the software come more efficient and streamlined processes. Work processes can be automated and standardized through customized workflows, and employees and business partners can take part in these workflows for a more straightforward collaboration online.

Roles and Responsibilities: the adoption of NotifyMe will allow greater autonomy to employees in managing their tasks and actions and less burden on managers. The new platform will be hosted on the cloud with a minimal impact on the IT and we do not anticipate any changes to IT staffing requirements.

Infrastructure: as the software is cloud-based, no additional hardware infrastructure is required. Also, the SaaS (Software as a Service) distribution model has no impact on IT costs (e.g. backup, application management, patching).

Justification

The migration of inspection and other quality management processes to the NotifyMe web-based software will result in greater efficiency with regards to company resources and business processes.

The adoption of NotifyMe is also aligned with corporate strategy and objectives since it uses technology to improve the way the Company does business.

Various options and alternatives could be analysed to determine the best way to leverage technology to standardize and automate the business processes within the Company and to improve the communication flow throughout the supply chain. While other alternatives and the status quo might be analysed, NotifyMe provides the best opportunity to realize benefits in an expedited manner while also allowing for the greatest improvement in efficiency and cost reduction.

Other alternatives, such as keeping the current methodology in place, developing a software internally or adopting a generic web-based platform (not specifically designed for inspection management) assume greater risk, provide less benefits and are not suitably aligned with current corporate strategy and objectives.