Digitalized Daily Work Management (D-DWM)

Daily Work Management (DWM), also known as Daily Management (DM) is a review mechanism performed every day where the performances are monitored. If the results are not at the desired levels, corrective actions are put in place promptly.?

DWM allows clear visibility of performances objectively and helps the cross-functional team focus on improvements. It helps to spot deviations from the target, get the relevant stakeholders involved in the improvement actions, and fix the problem rapidly.?

DWM was one of the key aspects of the lean manufacturing system pioneered by Toyota and other Japanese organizations during the middle of the 20th century. Significant efforts are placed on physically collecting data, plotting charts, and displaying them in physical printouts on a wall where a cross-functional management team walks through every morning to infer and act.?

Typically, the performances of the following areas are monitored every day:

The developments in IT as well as the onslaught of the COVID pandemic did both – enabled as well as necessitated the DWM to go digital. We implemented a DWM system harnessing the digital developments to acquire data automatically from ERP systems and equipment (stack monitoring, effluent monitoring, conditional monitoring sensors, etc.) wherever possible. As of now, we are populating these pieces of info into google sheets which are used to conduct the virtual daily meetings. As a COVID precaution, we stopped having physical meetings inside the plant even when everyone is present, and switched to online meetings. Putting DWM in a digital mode has enabled us to conduct such virtual meetings in a meaningful way.

We are able to get the pulse of the plant by focusing on the nine aspects listed in the picture above. The performances for the previous day on the aspects of safety & health, compliance, dispatch, production, quality, and efficiency, are reviewed by looking at the data points and charts. The plans for the following day and the week for inbound and outbound material flow, production, and equipment upkeep are also discussed and solidified. The whole exercise takes no more than 20 minutes per day, freeing up the time of personnel to focus on more value-adding activities. Since no physical setting for the meeting is needed, the stakeholders can attend the meeting closer to their workplace just by having a smartphone to see the displays, as well as to call into the virtual conference.

Our next step is to use BOTS to populate data from the source into the DWM system so that we do not need any human intervention for data entry purposes.??