Intranet for Manufacturing: Creating a Connected Manufacturing Workplace

In today’s competitive environment, manufacturing industries need to quickly respond to any shifts in their markets—changes in raw material cost, new quality control measures, new technology, etc. Industrial modernization and the shift to smart manufacturing processes have sparked the need for automation, streamlined internal processes, empowered communication, and secure data management.

Certainly, choosing the right digital platform is important to keep up with the competition. An intranet for the manufacturing sector is a proven solution to strengthening communication and operational efficiency. It offers a unified platform to streamline your teams, resources, processes, and projects together, thereby amplifying your projects, documents, and task management efforts. Let’s explore some core benefits of having an intranet for the manufacturing sector.

Top Benefits of Implementing an Intranet for Manufacturing Industry

1. Enhanced Mobility to Empower Your Shop Floor and Field Employees

Adopting an intranet for manufacturing industries makes it easy for the sales staff to manage their workday on their mobile devices. They can access and manage their schedules, communicate with other employees in different locations, take quick notes during a customer visit, stay informed of important company news, and access the latest versions of collateral material and case studies—all while they are on the shop floor or on the go.

2. Robust Information Search Capabilities

The manufacturing intranet solution based on the SharePoint environment is backed up with the advanced search capabilities of Microsoft 365 to empower your sales teams to find product-related information, price lists, and quotations easily and quickly. Field employees can also use Microsoft applications to create a quick presentation to display use cases, recent customer successes, modify a document with new statistics and stay updated in real-time.

3. Secure and Unified Collaboration

Most manufacturing companies run round-the-clock operations, and many have distributed operations around the globe. However, an intranet for manufacturing offers a centralized and secure digital workplace solution to unify the workforce and put everybody on one platform where they can collaborate and be more productive collectively. Project managers can track the daily production targets, add comments, mark maintenance events, or coordinate with the staff for any corrective actions, irrespective of location. From executives to factory floor workers, it ensures access to information, people, and expertise anywhere, anytime.

4. Seamless Integration with Line of Business Systems

The ability of SharePoint-based manufacturing intranet solutions to integrate with mission-critical software like ERPs, CRMs, QMS, accounting, etc., helps your front-line or back-office employees rely on a single platform to do their jobs. These integrations consolidate data from disparate systems to form a powerful base from which intelligent reports can be displayed. Such targeted reports empower your employees to access instant information from LOB systems without navigating away from the centralized portal.

5. Automates Complex Business Processes and Shortens Approval Cycles

Manufacturing intranet solution automates complex business processes that help simplify manufacturing operations. Automated workflows and custom forms for purchase requests, SOPs management, employee onboarding, new product development, and more, coupled with a multi-stage approval process and follow-up reminders, enhance efficiency. This drastically reduces approval times since digital forms do not get lost or buried, and the system sends reminder emails when there is a delay in the process.

6. Creates A Paperless Workplace with Secured Document Libraries

Manufacturing companies need to access and maintain critical business documents like reports, forms, invoices, contracts, agreements, and legal and employee documents. A manufacturing intranet solution in the SharePoint environment allows you to create multiple documents with in-built functionality for versioning, co-authoring, sharing, and maintaining change history. You can organize these libraries by enabling role-based permissions and creating a strong governance structure. The multilayer permission system can be applied to sites, teams, and crucial documents like engineering drawings, quality control documents, etc., to ensure best-in-class security.

7. Dedicated Project Spaces to Manage Projects and Tasks

The robust project management features help stakeholders create, assign, track, and supervise tasks seamlessly to meet project deadlines. Each project site offers a dedicated, secure document library to maintain project metrics, budgeting, timeline, etc. The project dashboard functionality gives you a quick snapshot view of the progress of your projects and the capability to monitor tasks, issues, and risks of individual projects. It seamlessly integrates with communication tools to enhance overall accountability while ensuring the project stays on track.

8. Informed Decisions with Real-Time Visibility into Production Activities

An intranet for the manufacturing industry enables your shop floor workers to report on their work activities by filling out a daily activity report. Floor managers can use the recorded activities to track actions and prepare shift summary reports, machine downtime, and quality inspection reports and upload them on a unified platform, making them accessible to the stakeholders. Furthermore, the plant production managers can capture information from these reports to implement further corrective actions to meet the required standards and deadlines. With integrated tools like Power BI, the captured data can be easily converted into visual graphs and charts so the management team can quickly review the metrics and make meaningful decisions.

BizPortals 365, a SharePoint-based intranet, provides a personalized experience to enable smart manufacturing systems within organizations. Whether you have a single manufacturing setup or hundreds of sites across the globe, BizPortals 365 enables your workforce to get the right information to the right employees at the right time in just a few clicks. Our flexible and scalable digital solution is powered by a strong ecosystem of Microsoft 365 and SharePoint environment to increase employee productivity, boost collaboration, and ensure security and compliance throughout your manufacturing firm.