If you’ve ever experienced the frustration of wading through a documents folder on your computer, then you have a small idea of what manufacturing companies experience. Typically dealing with thousands of documents at once, these firms can cut costs significantly just by making documents easier to find, fix and share.
Manufacturing companies, industrial services firms and biotechnology organizations all function within regulated environments. Companies must prove that they are following industry standards for training, testing and manufacturing processes, often in great detail.
Sam Schutte, founder of
Unstoppable Software, says some start out trying to track everything using Excel spreadsheets, only to get bogged down by thousands and thousands of documents. Advances in technology mean that the price of managing documents efficiently is less than the cost of time spent juggling them without an organized system in place.
“In businesses today, especially research companies, a huge proportion of knowledge workers’ time is spent dealing with documents: hunting to find them, working together to update them or generating them manually," he says. "Those are time-intensive problems we can help fix, so they can collaborate more easily.”
The company often works with existing programs, such as SharePoint, to create customized, out-of-the-box software for manufacturers and industrial services companies that help them add more functions to a program.
Some work almost like a plug-in: they can be “bolted” onto existing software to add functionality, such as creating contracts or service records, which can then be shared and tracked.
Unstoppable also addresses workflow, security and keeping track of documents for regulation agencies. The company also automates some tasks, such as generating AutoCAD documents on the fly from various data sources.
Quality management and regulatory systems require strict adherence to certain standard operating procedures.
“It’s all about being able to say you’re a high-quality vendor," Schutte says."You’ve got to come up with a plan and stick to it, then you have to show what your plan is, how it’s been revised and prove that everyone read it and was trained on it.”
Unstoppable offers cloud-based and software programs, with varying levels of customization.
By Robin Donovan
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