How Mint is digitizing their planning with smart integrations

“By continuing to invest in digital innovation, we can work more efficiently, stay interesting in a competitive market and offer customers an even better service.”

Lars Bieleman - Process Manager/Office Service at Mint Interieur

Ambition

Process optimization in the manufacturing industry: digital capacity planning at MINT interior

In the world of high-quality handmade interiors, tight planning has major advantages in terms of the efficiency and robustness of the production line. Due to challenges related to manual and duplication of work, sharing information and cross-application links, Mint interieur needed a digital solution that takes into account usability, robustness and scalability. To analyze, optimize and centralize internal business processes and information flows regarding capacity planning, they have therefore entered into a partnership with Flawless Workflow. MINT interior understands the relevance of a digital way of working in an era of digitization and innovation, and thereby strives to promote production quality with a keen eye for future growth.

Solution

Digital Roadmap

Workflow analysis

As the start of the collaboration between Flawless Workflow and MINT interior, strong emphasis was placed on establishing the internal procedures and work processes. Through interactive workshops, the most important steps in the business process with their supporting applications, as well as the biggest points of frustration, were found and documented.

Gap analysis

By centralizing and mapping the functions of IT within the company, a strong foundation is laid for analyzing the shortcomings and challenges that the solution will have to address. By means of a gap analysis, Flawless Workflow was able to provide insight into the possibilities within planning and priorities could depend on the urgency to follow them up in solution research.

The key points identified during the gap analysis relate to the ability to plan at multiple levels of abstraction, the standardization of data input, and centralization of data storage. By closely involving MINT interior at this stage of the process, together with Flawless Workflow, it has laid a good basis for researching potential solutions.

Solution research

The goal of effective solution research is to be able to support customer priorities from different angles and specialization levels. When choosing the right solution, the saturation of the market with regard to planning-oriented application options can sometimes blur or complicate the purpose of a subsequent solution. The previously followed steps in the Flawless Workflow digital roadmap were therefore able to identify priorities to make the choices for MINT interior clearer.

When looking for a suitable solution, it is not only important what options the software offers in terms of capacity planning, but also takes into account the impact of the implementation on the current business process. In addition, it is important that a smooth migration to the new system is possible without significant disruption to the current way of working. As a result of the solution research, based on MINT interior's pre-determined priorities, Flawless Workflow was able to identify opportunities from four different angles, distinguishing them based on robustness, user-friendliness, effort and effect.

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Results

Efficiency, Speed and Grip

Optimized planning

Redesigning the current planning system is a relatively simple solution that can make easy profits in the short term. An additional advantage here is that the staff needs little or no extra training to deal with it comfortably.

The power of specialization

Adopting a new third-party software package can sometimes seem intimidating. Nevertheless, it is these specialized parties that often offer the solution that a company like MINT interior needs. At the cost of a slightly more expensive price tag and a slightly steeper learning curve, this promises to be a very suitable solution.

Smart Integration into ERP

The integration of the planning module into MINT interior's current ERP system provides a very practical solution for analysis and reporting. With relatively little effort, a significant step can also be made for standardized data entry.

Innovation with proprietary technology

The knowledge and skills of Flawless Workflow are not limited to consultancy and solution research. With a very talented team of full-stack developers, our own solution is also under development in the form of an MIEN platform. A collaboration with MINT interior could be very lucrative to achieve their own requirements.

Conclusion and next steps

Through effective and close communication with MINT interior, Flawless Workflow has been able to offer a diverse portfolio of potential solutions. However, MINT interior realizes that it is crucial to experience the practical differences between the solutions. For this purpose, demos were requested to help with the final system choice. By tackling this by going through the digital roadmap, it is ensured that MINT's planning is optimized integrally within the organization's current process and IT structure.

As a next step, MINT has the ambition to apply data-driven work more widely within the organization. The case at MINT interior is a good example of making innovation within the manufacturing industry practical and concrete.

Why we care about digital innovation:
“As a growing company, we are looking for a system that can make our processes more efficient and professional. After taking previous steps in other digital aspects, the planning was up to the neighborhood this time. Due to our growing order intake and because of our new building, it is important to provide insight into the long and short term planning for the various disciplines within Mint. Different functions have different goals and interests in planning.

By continuing to invest in digital innovation, we can work more efficiently, stay interesting in an increasingly competitive market and offer customers an even better service.

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Our experience with Flawless:‍

Via via, we came into contact with Flawless, since at that time our challenge was planning, we easily presented our problem to them. To prevent us from working unprepared with a planning module, and to avoid spending a lot of time and energy ourselves in a lot of our own research, we thought Flawless's preliminary research was a good starting point for our planning challenge. After several discussions with stakeholders, Flawless thoroughly identified our current way of working. This already provides the first insights for possible internal improvements. After analyses and questioning the wishes of the various stakeholders, several recommendations were made. Two things that we found very pleasant were. Taking the time to understand the differences between different stakeholders, management needs different insights into planning than the workshop manager. This has been well identified and clearly researched.

Giving various options in an edifying form, not only expensive external systems were recommended. But from very accessible to major impact and from small to large trajectories.”

Lars Bieleman - Process Manager/Office Service at Mint Interieur

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