Book a demo

Navigating your production through COVID-19

As a manufacturing community, the response to COVID-19 has been overwhelming. Thank you all for working tirelessly to support the health and care of the country and for keeping the critical supply chains running. We wanted to share some tips below on getting the most from your software to help you navigate and respond to sudden changes in resource, demand and capacity, and effectively support social distancing.

We’re here to support you, so please don’t hesitate to get in touch if you have any questions or need further information.

Dealing with rapid changes and disruptions

You’ll most certainly be dealing with frequent changes and disruptions. Perhaps you’re faced with the challenge of switching your production to support the immediate demand for critical components for medical equipment needed to fight Covid-19. You may also be experiencing an increase in staff absences due to self-isolation or delays in the supply chain.

Seiki manufacturing software
If your solution includes

Seiki Scheduler

  • Make use of the efficiency factor of your resources if you expect this to change due to the introduction of different products, or as staff are moved to equipment they may be less familiar with.
  • Adjust the available hours for each resource daily to reflect reduced capacity where manning levels are lower.
  • Run what-if scenarios to understand the impact of or to justify any changes
  • On the Workload View monitor your capacity over the coming weeks to identify any machine availability that you can promote or use to respond to quickly to calls for parts. It’ll also provide you with an early indicator of potential problems or shortfalls, so you can take proactive, preventative measures.
Learn more
Seiki AIR on Mobile Devices
If your solution includes

Jobpack DNC and/or Digital Work Queues

  • You can make sure that your team on the shopfloor has all the latest, approved information and files for each operation (Jobpack DNC), and
  • that they are working to the latest priorities and deadlines (Work Queue)

This is particularly helpful if they are starting work on new products with tight deadlines.

Learn more

Supporting the Health and Safety of your team

With the health and safety of your team in mind, and knowing you’ll be doing everything you can to help support effective social distancing within your business, a quick reminder that:

  • If you have any version of our Monitoring module, make use of the Live Status feature, which gives you a real time view of the status of resources from anywhere on the LAN/WAN, to minimise unnecessary walkabouts. If you’ve also got our WIP Booking module you’ll also be able to see the currently active operation on each machine.
  • Seiki AIR will run on almost any device with a browser, so users don’t have to share terminals. They’ll just need the URL and their login details.
  • You can deliver production and manufacturing information paperlessly to the shopfloor if you’ve got any version of our Jobpack DNC, and/or digital Work Queue modules. Seiki AIR also has the digital batch card.

For more ideas about how to make best use of your Seiki manufacturing system, so that you can focus on responding with greater confidence to these turbulent market conditions, read our article Minimise the unexpected