Document Management in Manufacturing Businesses:

In 2022 alone, India’s manufacturing sector witnessed a 210% increase compared to the previous year’s statistics – Goldman Sachs. 

So what made this happen?

The same study suggests that sectors including petrochemicals, electronics and data centers contributed to this rapid growth. 

Which contributed to the country’s overall GDP drastically.

Imagine the potential we keep as a country if we could eradicate the challenges these companies face regularly. 

Problems like management, documentation and compliances might look small but can significantly impact your company’s growth. 

Manufacturing enterprises especially go through a number of challenges in their regular operations, some of which are: 

1. Quality control 
2. Demand forecasting
3. Supply chain management
4. And compliance requirements. 

For a company manufacturing a single lot of products, keeping track of records and manually creating a record of all purchase orders might not sound like a difficult task. But the question becomes how difficult is this task for a business that makes 100s of batches of different products on a regular basis. 

Administrative errors are called for when your employees are dealing with stacks of paper on an everyday basis. 

Solution? 

Well, a DMS can help but before we suggest one, let’s first see what are some places where you need assistance being in the manufacturing business. 

Ultimate Role of Document Management System in Manufacturing Industries:

We took the assistance of machines and automated our production processes, too, didn’t we? Then why is it that digitization comes with so many questions? 

Simply because there persists a knowledge gap, manufacturers find such a transformation drastic, and keep thinking over the ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’ of this process instead of focusing on the benefits it can bring to them. 

Benefits Digitization can Bring to Manufacturing Businesses: 

1. Significant reduction in overheads. If we go with the analogy we used earlier, the overheads of a company manufacturing a single lot of product in a day might not be much. Still, for a company producing 100 batches a day, it adds up as an expense.
2. Better control over regular processes. For a company creating 10 documents daily for a single batch, filling up details and organizing them in storage boxes isn’t a big task. But do it for a 100 batch, and you’ll know how easy it is to get a document misfiled.
3. Improved quality management. Manufacturing businesses keep ISO accreditations to represent the quality standards of their products. Keeping up with their compliances requires them to retain an awful amount of paper, which gets more manageable with a DMS.

Benefits we get. But how does a DMS make all this possible? Let’s see. 

1. Inventory Management 

Running out of inventory and raw materials is the biggest possible sin for a manufacturing company. Managing inventory for a business includes a lot more than restocking when required. 

It is a backend process that requires the employees to forecast how much inventory will be needed in the future by calculating the existing lot, the expected supply and the time it will take to make the trade. It’s all numbers and approvals. 

A little disruption at the backend that upsets your inventory system can drastically disturb your supply chain, which can cause you a lot of monetary losses. 

But what are these disruptions that can have such a huge impact? 

More often than not, these disruptions are a result of small management issues and lack, such as: 

1. Ignored purchase requisitions
2. Misplaced P.Os
3. And untraceable Goods Delivery Notes

Put a Document Management System in the picture, and there goes these mismanagement challenges. 

No document can ever get misplaced with the advanced technologies that a DMS offers. All you have to do is ensure that these are digitized and organized properly on the portal. You would have created a shared repository of your corporate assets in a few clicks, bringing transparency and accountability back to your company. 

2. Standardization of Processes 

A single BMR requires a thousand approvals from people within and outside of the organization. How hectic and chaotic can it get for your employees to get indulged in this to-and-fro activity for 100 BMRs every day? 

Such tasks that are repeated regularly yet do not add any value to the overall operations can be tiring and time-consuming for your employees. Moreover, no matter the expertise, these are also highly prone to human errors. 

Similar to a BMR, maintaining Device History Records also comes as a task for companies manufacturing medical devices. This is because, per the current regulations, companies must retain and maintain a DHR for every batch, lot and unit a company produces. 

That is a lot of paper to manage, even if you deploy your entire workforce to it, which is precisely where a DMS like dox2U with innovative functionalities will come to your rescue. 

3. Traceability across Organization 

Invoices, device manuals, purchase orders, financial records, and SoPs are a few of the documents that manufacturing companies have to maintain mandatorily. 

Companies dealing in pharmaceutical, food and beverage and life science manufacturing especially have to incorporate tools that help them manage and monitor each document created in the process to improve the traceability of such products. 

This is because of the regulatory compliances that they have to keep up with to keep serving in the industry. 

An example of such compliance would be the Batch Manufacturing Records. Pharma companies have to prepare a BMR for every lot of drug that they manufacture. This is to ensure standardization. 

4. Quality Management

Quality management is one of the most crucial processes for any manufacturing business. Any mistakes here can jeopardize your business’s operation significantly. Thus, manufacturing enterprises must maintain an archive of all their records and documents properly for future purposes. 

This also becomes necessary because it interests the stakeholders too. 

They are mostly curious to know the standards of quality maintained within such companies to ensure their credibility in the market is maintained. 

How can dox2U help you? 

dox2u is a cloud-based document management system that stresses the importance of going paperless for such businesses. It provides companies of all sizes the tools they need to go digital by investing only minimal efforts. 

Some of the noteworthy functionalities of dox2U are: 

1. It helps you create a shared, un-siloed repository of your enterprise data. Be it a BMR or a DHR; you will be able to store all of them for as long as your compliance requirements are without disrupting your regular operations. 
2. Deep search functionalities allow you to retrieve documents in seconds, even when you have forgotten the file title. It comes with text-based and filter-based search capabilities, which makes your life easier. 
3. Advanced security features like Audit Logs, Granular Access Control and AES-256 powered encryption help you securely deal with your enterprise data. 

Concluding Remarks:

A document management system in place is essential for manufacturing businesses. It can scale your business in no time by eliminating mundane tasks from your employees’ regular schedules and allowing them to work with improved focus on activities that ultimately require their expertise. 

But not any DMS can take up this responsibility to turn things around for you. You must ensure you choose one that fits your business’s requirements like a piece of a puzzle. This is why we vouch for dox2U; it comes with a freemium package and lets you test all sorts of things before you invest! 

Sign up for your FREE dox2U Trial here!