Going paperless: start small, but start with the end in mind

MES/MOM is often a journey. If you aren't ready to go all in, that's fine.

But don't get left behind. If you can't do everything, at least do something. Start small.

A great first step is removing paper from the shopfloor.

Paper is the enemy of progress

Paper travellers. Job cards. Clipboards. Printed work instructions. Quality check sheets. Logbooks. Whiteboards.

They get lost, they get damaged, and they're often illegible. The data on them arrives late, if it arrives at all, and someone has to type it into a system later. Usually at the end of the shift. Usually from memory.

What you gain

The more paper you remove, the more of these benefits you get:

• More accurate data. Captured at the moment, not reconstructed afterwards.
• A simpler operator experience. No binders, travellers or printouts. The right information at the right time, on one screen.
• Real-time visibility. No waiting until the end of the shift or the job to see what's happening.
• Data-driven decisions. Based on facts, not on whoever shouts loudest in the morning meeting.
• Automatic data collection. Once you're digital, connecting the equipment becomes a natural next step.
• Prompts to do the right thing. The system guides operators through each step and flags what's been missed.

Where to start

Pick the paper that hurts most. Often that's:

• Quality check sheets, where errors and missed checks cause real problems
• Downtime logs, where the numbers are guesses
• Work instructions, where version control is a constant battle
• Travellers, where finding out where an order is means walking the floor

It can be phased. One process, one line, one form at a time.

The one mistake to avoid

Start small. But start with the end in mind.

The trap is choosing a quick, cheap tool to digitise one form, then another tool for the next, then another. Each one works. None of them talk to each other. And none can grow into production execution, traceability or maintenance.

Before long you've swapped paper silos for digital silos, and you'll need to switch and re-invest, or your progress stalls.

So think about your end game, even on day one. Choose a platform that can start with digital forms and checklists, and grow into full MES/MOM without starting again. That's the same argument I make in Connected worker: one app, not five.

Don't just copy the paper

One more thing. Don't recreate the paper form on a screen field by field.

Use the move to ask whether every field is needed, whether some can be captured automatically, and whether the process itself could be simpler. Digitising a bad form gives you a bad digital form.

Which piece of paper on your shopfloor would you most like to see the back of?