December 2022
New Views 🪟
I hope you’ve had a magical Christmas break and a great start to the new year. I’m writing this on the last day of the year and finding that there is a lot to be thankful for in 2022. Clearly, we’ve matured. Our main workflow product, just rebranded Flows, as you may have seen, has been put through its paces. Clients have tested it in production environments that matter – from medical to aerospace. As a result, we’ve addressed scale issues, corner cases and more. The Enhanced Workflow Scheduling I highlighted last month, which reflects labour availability, is just one example. While a little battered and bruised, we passed the test. Flows is a world-class tool that rethinks the art of the possible in flexible workflow management.
I'm not saying we’re done learning. In this business, we never are. But we’re now able to build on what we learned to date and start focusing on utilizing the data we generate, not just on making the process management and data collection processes easier. 2023 will be focused on:
improving the User Experience to surface the data that matters when needed,
including more greater analytical capabilities while taking advantage of the phenomenal improvements in underlying AI algorithms (subject of considerable personal fascination recently), and
enabling entirely new views on the data generated.
If the efforts of the last month are anything to go by, it’s going to be a wild ride. Within just 2 weeks the team conceived of, and delivered, an entirely new view on production progress. This is the Work In Progress Matrix, now available to subscribers. It shows the status of orders along it’s stages in a colour coded, transparent way. At each stage, users can simply click on a status to get more information.
This is now the third production overview. Alongside a traditional GANTT chart (which shows machines on the Y axis) we also released the Production GANTT this year, which shows Orders on the Y axis and can be expanded to show individual pieces in those orders. Of course, information on each part can also be accessed in the Traceability Report. The ability to generate different views from the same data, quickly, demonstrates the clear advantage that digital, especially browser based tools have over manual views or even excel sheets – still the dominant type of production management in the field.
It's that advantage that we hope to build on in 2023. We have so much more to show you in that regard. There’s extremely exciting announcements coming in Q1. I can literally not wait to share them.
I hope you’re as optimistic and excited about the times ahead as we are. Look forward to hearing from you either way!
Happy New Year!