Manufacturers are Caught in a Vicious Shadow IT Cycle. How Trigent’s AI Manufacturing Solutions Shun Inefficient Workarounds and Boosts Organizational Efficiency.

It all began with staring at a piece of paper and wondering man, wouldn’t it be a lot easier if this was all on a spreadsheet that we could use and edit together! 

That aha moment sparked him to compose some macros and design an Excel sheet that would go on to become the company’s defacto operating system for the next three years.

He eventually moved out of the company, but the plant grew in scale, inviting new machines. Yet the factory’s workflow ran on a stack of excel sheets, with the original spreadsheet being the master of them all.

And then one fine day, a new employee accidentally made an error and saw their sheets go haywire. It was a moment of reckoning for the leadership as they realized it was not just the sheets, but the entire factory had come to a standstill.

Cut to a few more years, where the factory was now running on a series of OEM softwares across resource planning, production scheduling, inventory optimization, and warehouse management. Yet beneath these expensive OEMs were born-again spreadsheets, lurking in the shadows, quietly pulling the strings of the business.

The effects of shadow IT soon become obvious: 

1. A machine went down at 9.00 in the morning. The production scheduler, unaware of the development, had already scheduled a job in their spreadsheet for that machine.

2. An operator had forgotten to log a downtime event. The format to enter downtime reasons were inconsistent across plants.

3. The job was scheduled, but a raw material shortage had stalled the run.

4. Critical issues from previous shifts get lost in long spreadsheet comments. Shift teams continue production without taking stock of unresolved maintenance issues.

5, Different plants use different metrics to compute operator productivity.

There were a multitude of issues that began to creep across the factory floor all pointing to one singular factor: The data in the spreadsheets were not reflective of the floor realities.

The leadership immediately opts for an overhaul, this time seeking the help of a system integrator to customize the ERP and MES systems to suit their business workflow.

But the customization induces inefficiencies of a different order. For every vendor upgrade, The custom core had to be rewritten and retested, failing which exposed the organization to serious security vulnerabilities. Further customization resulted in the need for specialized IT skills rather than standardized IT resources. Sooner than the later, the leadership observes the vendor lock-in had been cast, for the company is wholly dependent on the deeply customized OEMs, whose annual maintenance costs outweigh its benefits. At this point, disgruntled with the convoluted systems, someone began to start up a spreadsheet.

This is the vicious cycle of Shadow IT across three Manufacturing archetypes: Fragmenters, Evaders, and Clingers.

Fragmenters

A study shows that more than 85% of manufacturers run their entire workflow on a patchwork of excel sheets, paper logs, monolithic applications, and tribal knowledge. But most of these manufacturers’ business have outgrown the botched systems in place. Now they are caught with a dilemma as to whether they should jump into full-blown rigid OEM systems or contend with existing spreadsheet-driven IT, rampant with scattered data and manual workflows. Added to this, the question of how to infuse AI confounds them. Because AI is increasingly seen as a lever to counter elevated input costs and persistent inflation, fragmenters are actively exploring AI-powered manufacturing IT services to steer their business towards organizational efficiency and resilience.

How Trigent’s Prebuilt Modules Modernized a Fragmented ITscape. 

The fragmenter in question was a health and wellbeing manufacturer, whose business operations was progressively transformed with a series of low-disruption fixes. The monolithic order management system was replaced by a prebuilt order management module that allowed adding users, updating prices, and managing promotions on the go. Bulk-ordering was enabled through an excel-style interface. A similar transformation was seen in order picking where the pickers were smartly guided by a mobile application suggesting the shortest route for picking. It also ensured that only the correct items were picked. In a similar fashion, an inventory-fulfillment module rejuvenated warehouse management, enabling batch, lot, and zone tracking. Thus the fragmented IT landscape had become a cohesive, connected ecosystem, which steered the business to operate at an optimal time, cost, and effort.

Evaders

Evaders have already invested in off-the-shelf software for their manufacturing functions across production, inventory, warehouse, quality and maintenance. However managing these processes within the traditional OEM interfaces tends to be tedious. Data alterations, back and forth email exchanges, and approvals often happen outside of these OEMs. Most business teams are comfortable in importing data from the OEMs, performing data manipulations in Excel, and exporting data back into the OEM software. Thus OEMs act as systems of record, while spreadsheets are the systems of action. But this parallel processing was not without consequences.

It introduces 3 major hurdles: 

1. Firstly, a significant human effort is required to ensure that the spreadsheet remains current.
2. Constant manual entries introduce errors. Even a decimal slip can spell major troubles.
3. Different teams working in their own spreadsheets induce major data latency, hindering the ability to anticipate problems and act in real time.

Most of the evaders are conscious of the shadow IT issues. They are keen on standardizing workflows around OEMs through Manufacturing AI integration services so as to optimize for greater efficiency and resilience.