Regulation Drives Companies to “Paperless” system, but they Need to Integrated

Regulation is a growing principle required in solutions. The growing demand is coming from increased government regulations on industry around environmental impact, or trace-ability, really driving “Accountability” for actions and being able to determine history fast. Not all the drive is coming from government regulation requirements, in many industries it is being driven by the consumer as a value differentiator for the products.

So we are seeing investments in serialization systems in Life Science and Food and Bev, which extend the existing packaging lines, and are integrated to MES and ERP systems.

But the area that is interesting to me is not this section it is the implementation of “paperless strategies” removing the “clipboard” and replacing it with some forms based software. I have reviewed 3 of these systems, that are driving consistency in capturing of information. Within built rules that drive the user to capture the required points, take the required actions in order to satisfy the particular regulation or combination of regulations required for shipping that product.

While the shift to “paperless” has been a goal for a long while and people have headed down this when implementing a MES (Manufacturing Execution System), this is logical as the drive to paper less in integrated to operational events and practices. Providing an end to end trace-ability, and view into the manufacturing history of the solution.  

What concerns me what I started to see in Oil and Gas, Mining, F & B is these isolated event/ forms capturing systems that are put in isolated from the production/ operations system. Yes they may have some events and points integrated but the procedures are not an extension of the operational system. The captured data is in isolation of from operational/ production data, it should be captured along with the production records of what materials were consumed, who was operating the machine, and what product was going thru the system.

We seeing in the integrated solutions, the tradition operational/ mes system, being extended with a Business Process Modeling system, introducing workflows that can be configured to be triggered from the real time operational systems at Scada/ DCS or at the operational levels. Driving the capture, check, validation of process data boundary violation, or required capture to align with “inspection requirements “ from the ERP. The workflows natively interact between the systems, just extending the process operational processes but provide forms to drive intuitive actions, and capture. 

The most important part is that these are extendable and customization so that your companies capabilities, uniqueness can be captured as “best practices”. Most of all these are not separate systems they native extensions of the MES/ Supervisory automation, Quality applications driving the results and information back into the consistent repository.

So as you look going paperless, avoid doing it in isolation of the other systems, it must be extension, so that the operational process and practices from execution, to quality process, and process management, and extended with regulation requirement in a native way both from an operational experience process as well as data / information integration.