What are your digitalisation challenges?
Tell us what challenges your business faces and we will show you how Shoestring could help.
Many companies face similar business challenges – from expensive energy bills or time wasted trying to locate jobs on the shop floor to high scrap waste and machinery downtime. Solving these challenges could help a company improve their productivity, raise the quality of their products and enable them to meet more of their sustainability goals.
However, it is not always easy to identify which problem to start with; and even if a company does know where to begin, the available commercial options often look too complex and overfitting to be of much use. We have found that our solutions can bring improvements to a range of business aspects in almost any sector – take a look below to find out why.
Low-cost digital solutions
Low-cost digital solutions
Productivity
Productivity is one of the key challenges companies face when trying to increase growth. Digitalisation can help improve productivity, and Shoestring’s solutions give companies a low risk, low-cost way to start understanding how they should specify a commercial solution which will best meet their company’s needs.
Typical solutions that help improve productivity include:
- Downtime monitoring
- Job location tracking
Sustainability
Automating data collection also plays a pivotal role in enabling businesses to make decisions to meet sustainability goals. Shoestring offers simple solutions that empower companies to incorporate environmentally conscious practices.
Solutions that support sustainability include:
- Power monitoring
- Scrap monitoring
- Air quality monitoring
Digital Skills
Each employee training programme gives employees hands-on experience of building and deploying a digital solution, starting them on a journey of seeing how improved data collection leads to better data analysis and improved business practice in the company.
Supply Chain
Supply chain resilience is often threatened when data is not readily available to be shared between suppliers and customers. By using the Shoestring approach, companies are joining forces in Shoestring’s Awareness and Digital Needs Workshops to identify how supply chain challenges can be addressed with low-cost data sharing solutions.
During a recent workshop, participants from a group of manufacturers revealed that they were most interested in sharing data related to quality and logistics / delivery information. Researchers in the Made Smarter Connected Factory centre are currently developing some low-cost data sharing solutions.
Our process
Shoestring talked to over 450 manufacturers. Management and operation staff from this range of small-to-medium-sized companies pinpointed their business constraints and priorities. Their constraints were often defined as the most important buying factors raised by their customers, such as price, quality, and delivery. Their business priorities were typically those issues giving them the biggest headaches, such as people and information, plant and equipment, cash flow or the supply chain.
Once their business needs were collated, the Shoestring research team matched each need to a digital solution area. When a company knows their digital solution area, it is easier for them to specify a simple solution within that area that they need to help them get started. Subsequent Requirements workshops with companies in construction, logistics, and agriculture found that their needs were very similar across different sectors, just described differently, and the digital solutions required were often the same.
Impact
After collecting and analysing data on processes in a company, it can be overwhelming when trying to work out where to start. Research shows that smaller companies find it especially challenging.
Shoestring is designed to give companies a low risk, easy way to deploy a simple digital solution that meets one of their top business needs.
Impact
After collecting and analysing data on processes in a company, it can be overwhelming when trying to work out where to start. Research shows that smaller companies find it especially challenging.
Shoestring is designed to give companies a low risk, easy way to deploy a simple digital solution that meets one of their top business needs.
