FactoryFour

Before FactoryFour, CPO’s clinicians sent plaster casts and clay impressions of patients' limbs along with paper forms to their central fabrication facilities. Often, the ordering process involved several back-and-forth calls to rectify errors or clarify details in the order submission. Order data was then manually transcribed, and issued to the floor as a paperwork order. During production, a job traveler moved through each work center, and technicians referenced the paperwork order to produce each custom product.Whenever a customer called with an order inquiry, it required a tedious process of going to the floor, locating the job traveler, and relaying the order status back to the customer. CPO needed a solution that would connect their clinics directly to the manufacturing floor, providing immediate visibility for customers and managers while streamlining the process for their technicians.

ComfortFit Labs, a New Jersey-based packaging manufacturer that designs and manufactures custom orthotics, was facing a challenge with their traditional order processing workflow. The process was tedious, involving significant manual labor and long turnaround times. Customers would send plaster casts of their patients’ limbs along with paper order forms to ComfortFit. The order data was recorded manually, and when a work order was issued to the floor, technicians had to manually measure the cast and find the right mold out of hundreds to manufacture from. This resulted in an average 7–20 day turnaround time with a process that was prone to human error from order entry.

Arnold Packaging, a comprehensive supplier to the packaging industry, faced a significant challenge in their production process. Their process started with the collection of custom specs for an order and communicating them to the production floor. Technicians then worked together to complete various tasks in a workflow before the deliver-by date. However, activity was recorded manually on time sheets, which meant managers lacked real-time visibility on their operations. The company had a tedious, manual process of understanding data that couldn’t keep up with the pace of the production floor. Arnold Packaging needed a solution that would provide advanced production visibility, so that they could enhance technician productivity and gain significant managerial time savings.