By Carlos Rojas, Director of Vertical Sales, Emerging Markets, Cisco
Collaboration among employees is often top of mind for executives. As former VP and General Manager of Manufacturing at Scott Specialty Gases, I learned that driving collaboration throughout the manufacturing process has two benefits:
- Improves a company's ability to respond to problems
- Directly contributes to greater profitability through higher productivity
Without fail, every day brings challenges in production planning, and the faster you can respond and resolve those problems, the more likely you are to increase your business productivity. The question is: How can CIOs and IT leaders play a role in boosting productivity and profits?
Time Equals Money
Improving collaboration is critical in a manufacturing environment, whether through:
- A unified communications system
- Improvement in cross-functional processes
- Or both
Every hour and every minute lost trying to resolve a problem costs money. The following formula calculates exactly how much:
Cost of Goods Sold
-------------------------------- = Hourly Cost of Operations
Number of Operating Hours
I recently visited a mining company in South America where we calculated the cost of operating to be US$315,000 per hour. If this company can save 20 minutes per incident, which occur twice a day on average, that's a potential daily savings of $210,000 - clearly a strong business case for investment in improved collaboration.
Running in Parallel
With today's unified communications systems, the chain of events required to communicate between multiple functions of the business can happen in parallel in a fraction of the time it would take to initiate all the notifications and communications separately.
In the mining company example, we could contact five people for the top three incidents that occur on a recurring basis and shorten their response time at a rate of $315,000 per hour. Given that improvement in productivity, the investment in the unified communications system pays for itself very quickly, often in just a few months.
IT Business Alignment
The mining company provides a perfect example of business and IT alignment. But to truly drive collaboration across the enterprise, especially in companies with a global footprint, there must be a holistic approach to engaging the overall enterprise architecture, including the network.
Today, there are services embedded in the network that can take applications such as unified communications to the next level by adding capabilities such as location services and mobility. These services can further shorten the time required to resolve problems.
Some of the biggest manufacturing companies in the world have learned that by stepping back and understanding how to link business goals with IT resources, they can dramatically improve their productivity and profitability. Collaboration is a key part of that success.
