Your customers should not have to call you to know what is happening on your shop floor!

Your customers should not have to call you to know what is happening on your shop floor!

For many years, Sigma’s customers followed a routine that is common in manufacturing. Whenever they wanted to know the status of their order, they would call the factory. Designers, supervisors and managers would receive repeated calls asking the same questions.

Has the design started? When will the tool be ready? Has the dispatch date changed?

Inside the factory, the situation was not very different. A large number of internal emails and phone calls were exchanged every day just to track the progress of work. Engineers and managers were spending a significant portion of their time answering status queries instead of focusing on design, manufacturing and problem solving.

When Sigma began building its Smart Factory systems, this issue became very clear. The problem was not communication. The problem was lack of visibility. Customers and internal teams did not have access to the same real time information.

As automated workflows were integrated into Sigma’s systems, this began to change. Data from design, planning and manufacturing started flowing automatically through the system. Customers no longer needed to call the factory for updates. They could simply log in and see the status of their work in real time. They could track progress, review updates, send change requests and receive automated alerts through the system itself.

The impact was immediate. Internal update emails dropped by nearly ninety percent and customer phone calls reduced by about eighty percent.
Instead of acting as human status trackers, engineers and managers could now focus on improving processes and delivering better outcomes.
When information becomes transparent, communication becomes meaningful.