Manufacturers have always been in the business of balancing trade-offs. These relate to either balancing production plant throughput versus cost containment without impacting on quality; customisation versus standardisation; and competition versus collaboration.

The manufacturing sector can best be described as an increasingly complex environment in which business strategies are formulated and decided upon, plans developed and subsequently implemented. But there are a number of challenges that still remain, specifically:

• Continually changing business models in the information economy
• Increased customer influence
• Attracting and retaining top talent
• Competing at a global level
• Ensuring profitable growth in a world of over capacity.

The quest for excellence has never been greater. As a business leader, the primary expectation is that your technology service provider operates as a partner with best intentions at heart; a partner that will ensure that you remain at the forefront of your field by enabling you to focus on your core business while taking care of your business enablers. Gijima is the perfect partner is this regard since it subscribes to the manufacturing sector’s core business drivers and can help you to:

Reduce costs by optimising your IT infrastructure

Instead of worrying about the cost of attracting, training and retaining IT staff to manage and support your IT environment, you can achieve cost improvement goals with Gijima’s outsourcing models and managed infrastructure service offerings. We can help you optimise your IT infrastructure, therein maximising both the financial and operational returns on your current investments.

Through consolidation, virtualisation and co-location, your business saves on its direct costs and indirect costs, including a reduction in your energy consumption. By providing your business with remote support, we can manage and resolve faults without the need for technicians to visit your site. This not only reduces the resolution time, but also eliminates the cost of travel.

Our ten year track record in the manufacturing industry has helped our clients achieve cost reduction and operational improvement through long-term strategic collaboration and by managing their changing business environment. Our long-term relationships within the outsourced environments have enabled us to achieve a client retention rate of more than 95%. Click here for a case study of how we managed to achieve this for one of our clients.

Increase factory throughput

Our tried and trusted systems integration methodologies and applications for business and manufacturing executions systems (MES) will enable you to optimise and increase throughput complemented by:

• Improved delivery performance through monitoring overall equipment effectiveness
• Improved product profitability through reduced labour costs and decreased cycle times by optimising production scheduling
• Reduced operational downtime through preventative maintenance of machinery based on the plant’s historical trends data.

Our comprehensive spread of manufacturing industry-focused solutions and services will provide you with a competitive edge through technological innovation.

Optimise factory work-in-progress

By applying and being able to support our advanced planning and production systems, integrated into the supply chain, your plant inventory will become easier to manage, enabling you to optimise the scheduling of raw materials, plants and inter-process, as well as finished goods.

Our extensive skills base and pool of resources, including qualified industrial engineers, boasts high-level manufacturing plant expertise relating to maintenance, production and engineering. These engineers will help you successfully integrate people, processes and technology in order to optimise plant performance.

Manage and minimise your safety and environmental risk

The increasing focus on enterprise-wide risk management and corporate governance demands a fresh and integrated approach to management processes from operational safety to corporate health and wellness.

Gijima’s G-Risk solution will enable you to manage a variety of lead and lag indicators for improved risk performance. More than just operational safety, the solution may be configured to cover all aspects of risk management and includes specific functionality to manage:

• Plant and other operational site ventilation
• Safety, health, environment and quality  
• Compliance with environmental standards.

By being able to provide your business with industry compliance systems and disaster recovery solutions, you are assured of working with a technology partner that understands the risks associated with safe working environments and environmental legislation in the manufacturing industry.

Our knowledge management solutions will ensure that your operation retains and shares its intellectual property securely within the business, safe from unauthorised users.

A real-time executive operational information solution

In today’s global business environment, managers on the move don’t always have core business information readily available to them. Gijima has a clear understanding of these needs and addresses this through a dashboard that is aligned with executives’ daily operational information requirements.

By utilising the latest location aware and spatial applications, you can access seemingly disparate information from within your organisation in order to meet your requirements. Spatial intelligence is the visualisation of spatially referenced data that provides decision-makers with a multi-disciplinary view of their business. By using Gijima’s spatial dash solution, your business decision makers will be able to visually interpret data relationships and patterns of cause-and-effect, therein improving the quality of your decisions and performance of your business as a whole.

Why Gijima?

Gijima is a trusted partner and industry leader in the IT sector that is able to offer a broad selection of IT solutions to the manufacturing industry.

We are privileged to have a selection of blue-chip local and multi-national clients with which we collaborate by providing thought leadership and guidance to optimise their business drivers and unlock their human capital potential.

Our services are delivered based on the industry validated frameworks such as ISO9001 and ITIL V3. This ensures that our service is always predictable and aligned to your business requirements. In addition to this, we apply the Project Management Institute (PMI) standards to our project management approach and transfer this knowledge and learning to all our clients, equipping them with skills essential in today’s business environment.

We offer year-round, 24x7 professional support through our Incident Services Management Centre (ISMC), which ensures that your IT services are always available to support your business. Underscored by our 70 points of presence across South Africa, we are able to provide on-site support and ease of access to each of our clients.

This diagram provides a high-level overview of Gijima’s manufacturing sector services and solutions.

For further information or a demonstration of our services and solutions, please contact our Manufacturing Industry Sales department on 012 675 5000 or e-mail manufacturing@gijima.com.