As the manufacturing sector becomes increasingly digitalized, applications become an even more crucial component of employees’ roles. Applications can now underpin every part of the manufacturing process, from product design to delivery.
For this large manufacturing company based in the United States, technology must enhance operations, not block them. With significant growth expected over the next five years and a desire from the business to maintain a lean, efficient team, their IT infrastructure must support and keep pace with these aggressive business goals.
In any workplace, applications can be the drivers of efficiency or obstacles to it. When employees have a frustrating experience with their applications, their productivity suffers, ultimately affecting the speed and efficiency of the business. This dynamic is even more important when working in lean teams.
Read on to discover how this manufacturing company saved hundreds of thousands of dollars for the business by eliminating the issues behind a critical application.
The Problem
Despite having established processes in places, this manufacturing organization knew there were underlying inefficiencies in their applications and were determined to address them by optimizing the underperforming technology hindering employee productivity.
Liquid Planner had been causing frustration among employees for over 2 years. As an essential project management tool for engineering staff, any downtime can severely impact productivity. Frequent downtime leaves employees struggling to access critical task details and collaborate effectively, leading to miscommunication, project delays, and, in the worst-case scenario, missed deadlines.
Product-related delays extend beyond internal operations, customers can too be affected. Just as frequent downtime can severely affect engineering staff, delays in product delivery similarly affect customer satisfaction and can lead to a diminished experience for customers.
It is essential that product development continues to support the company's profitability rather than jeopardize it - especially during a critical phase of growth. Keeping product development on track is not only crucial for profitability but also vital for maintaining momentum among employees driving the company forward.
The Approach
Nexthink’s comprehensive visibility enabled the business to gather data-driven insights into where application issues lie, eliminating any previous guesswork.
Through the 19 key pages built out within the Application Experience dashboard, the business now had the ability to see everything through a single view and understand their issues. The enhanced visibility made it easier to pinpoint where the issues were arising, whether from the device, the network, or within the application itself.
The data allowed the team to isolate that the issue was not occurring on their side but may have been a vendor side issue. Equipped with the data to prove this, the team brought this to the vendor and advocated for updates to be made to the application on their end.
The Impact
The team resolved all performance issues within Liquid Planner, saving the engineering team hours of time. The team calculated the cost per minute wasted to discover this single fix saved the organization $340,000 in engineering time – an outcome highly valued and validated by business leadership.
Not only did this save money for the organization, but valuable time has been given back to engineers, freeing them from the need to pause high-value projects due to application disruptions.
For this manufacturing company, resolving the performance issues has meant their engineers have fewer interruptions throughout their day, and now can work productively on product development to aid the business during this critical stage of growth.
Improved Application Performance Drives Business Productivity
With full visibility into their applications, employees no longer face frustrating inefficiencies. Their technology now runs seamlessly, aligning to the lean culture embedded throughout the organization.
As a result, the digital workplace team has evolved into a strategic business partner, dedicated to maintaining seamless operations and application performance across the organization.
With Application Experience already resolving critical business-critical application issues, the team has been left with the question – what can we do to further enhance our proactive IT environment?
Having already seen the value with Nexthink, the team are now eager to leverage Nexthink’s workflows and automations to further elevate their proactive IT environment.