Manufacturing

Whilst production line unit cost is rightly the focus for manufacturing businesses, the costs associated with raw material goods receipt & storage, picking, finished goods storage and despatch cannot be ignored. In typical manufacturing facilities there are a number of hidden costs and efficiencies to be gained in these processes.

Most of these facilities will use rugged mobile devices to enable smooth, efficient workflows, and will be comfortable that they are optimised. However, there are still significant costs that can be reduced and ‘idle’ hours that can be made productive.

The Waizu solution supports cost recovery and efficiencies gains by focussing on;

the hugely impactful cost of non-productive labour due to waiting for a mobile device to be checked, made ready and issued at the beginning of a shift and the reverse process at the end of a shift.
The cost of replacing lost/missing expensive rugged mobile devices
The cost of lost production due to device batteries not lasting a full shift
The cost of replacing all batteries on a 3 year cycle basis rather than on a need-to-replace basis

Non-Productive labour

Whilst the ‘idle’ time associated with this per user is a minimum of 4 mins, the reality is that we have seen that this can average 8 mins with some users even having to wait over 15 mins at the start of a shift.

If we use that realistic average of 8 mins per user in the a 100 device estate, the cost of a single shift per day using a 6-day week is £50K P.A. That loss converts to a lot of products to be manufactured, packed and despatched to recover.

Missing/Lost devices

Typical manufacturing operations lose between 5% and 8% of their rugged mobile device estate every single year. The replacement device cost alone in a 100-device estate is between £3K and £6K per annum, and as most estates cycle every 5 years that’s between £15K and £30K over that period of time.

Further, whilst devices are in a potentially lost state, it usually means that an operative is unable to use a device and is therefore using under-productive paper-based back-up to execute their workflows. Then there is the management cost of trying to locate missing Zebra devices or other brands of rugged mobile devices such as Honeywell and Datalogic.

Waizu Device Finder and Waizu Device Insights combine to resolve these issues by dramatically speeding up the issue and receipt back of rugged mobile devices, and reducing the number of lost/missing devices by quickly identifying those that are in a potentially lost state and providing tools that can enable a very quick recovery.

Our typical manufacturing payback period is between 17 & 20 weeks and Waizu starts delivering real savings the moment you switch our solution on.