Mobile Applications Can Help Your Manufacturing Business

If you are in the manufacturing business, you might think that mobile applications are for everyone else, but you’d be wrong. There are many ways that mobile applications can help your manufacturing business and here we’ll take a look at a few.

Customer Relationship Management

One of the most apparent ways that mobile applications can help your manufacturing business is with customer relationship management. TechTarget defines customer relationship management, or CRM, as  “practices, strategies, and technologies that companies use to manage and analyze their customer interactions and data throughout the customer lifecycle, with the goal of improving business relationships with customers, assisting in customer retention, and driving sales growth.” At Ayoka, our local employees can easily meet you on-site and work with you to develop a mobile app to collect and analyze your customer data in order to better meet their needs. For example, if the data you have collected shows that a particular customer always orders a product in February, you can start preparing your inventory at the end of January to be sure you can meet that customer’s needs. If one of your long-term customers places their 1,000th order, you might wish to congratulate them or send a special gift with the order. With a mobile app, you have this information at your fingertips, and can access it at any time to improve your customer relationship.

On the Shop Floor

It may seem obvious that mobile applications can help your manufacturing business with CRM, but they can also help you on the shop floor. Ayoka can develop a mobile app for your business that can help increase productivity on the shop floor. You can use a mobile app to integrate with PLC devices or equipment to analyze how efficiently machines or employees are working. Perhaps you’ll find that a machine is running 4 percent less efficiently than your other machines. In the short term, this might not show up, however, in the long term, this could cost you in amount of product made and possibly a customer or two. With a mobile app, you can monitor and report on the efficiency of your manufacturing business and use it to increase productivity. You can also use a mobile application to streamline operations. With the data you collect and analyze, you might discover that workflow among different people overlap and increase the risk for rework. Visibility into shopfloor operations often provides opportunities to improve performance on company metrics.

Inventory Systems

Mobile applications can also help your manufacturing business with inventory systems. Whether you are scanning products in and out on a daily basis, or using another form of technology to keep track of inventory, Ayoka can create a mobile application to help you monitor and adjust your inventory in real time. On any given day, at any given time, you can access your app and see how your inventory is doing. This can help you prepare your inventory and track how quickly or slowly inventory dwindles at certain times. If you notice inventory disappears when certain employees are on the clock, you might discover that you need to monitor that shift more closely for theft. If you have a new product launching, you can monitor how well it does in real time and know whether you need to amp up production or continue as planned. Mobile applications can help your manufacturing business in regard to inventory as well.

As you can see, mobile applications are useful for several aspects of your manufacturing business, and are worth investing in. They free up your time and add value to your business. What more could you want?