YOUR POSITION AT ROBIT AND MAIN RESPONSIBILITIES BY TASK AND REGIONAL LEVEL?

I work as Global Manufacturing Director and my priority is to ensure that our customers get their products delivered as promised and with the proven Robit quality. Thus, my main responsibility is overseeing and coordinating the manufacturing operations in Finland, UK, Korea, and Australia. Also, HSEQ-related topics form a significant part of my responsibilities. I work in close cooperation with factory heads of each location and, therefore, my daily tasks are much about communication; what are the current main issues, are projects on schedule, and are there any safety related concerns.

EXPERIENCE ON THE FIELD

I started my career as a production planner over 15 years ago. Since then, I have been working in different roles in metal industry, still always keeping very close to production and supply chain related processes. I could say that production management has been the guiding line of my career. In my current role it is nice to see time after time how you might be on different continents and work with people from different cultures, but “factory physics” remains more or less the same. This makes adapting existing processes and creating new ones very interesting.

KEY MARKET TRENDS ON YOUR FIELD OF EXPERTISE FOR THE NEXT FEW YEARS

As automation is part of our everyday life, I believe digitalization together with AI is the next big thing. Lean philosophy will stay as a basis and sustainable supply chain will become important competitive advantage. I see that AI offers possibilities in very concrete things like machine tracking. This is an application where the amount of information is in many cases enormous, because each machining center is creating new data all the time. Still, when going for a detailed level, there might be patterns that predict, for example, machine breaks or quality issues. For humans, analyzing and identifying patterns from a large amount of data would be very time consuming, or impossible, but with help of AI it is much more efficient and reliable. From customer point of view utilizing AI and digitalization mean faster and more reliable information flow, better visibility to supply chain and eventually, happier customers. I also believe this goes vice versa, better information flow towards factories will help us to reach higher delivery accuracy through increased quality of information.

HOW DO ROBIT’S ONGOING ACTIONS SUPPORT THE CUSTOMERS AND THEIR CURRENT CHALLENGES?

Current actions will support better availability and quality. We have started a Robit-wide project to review the existing processes and related quality assurance actions. The purpose is to spot any risks that non-conforming products would be delivered to customer. We are also developing the utilization of our ERP-system. The target is to utilize a more sophisticated MRP-module that better supports our production planning processes and gives improved visibility to whole supply chain, helping us gain better availability. For customer this is visible, once again, as better information. We are able to spot possible risks for delays in supply chain, and if there’s absolutely nothing we can do to eliminate these risks, we can at least offer reliable information regarding updated delivery time. Of course, IT-systems alone don’t solve majority of the issues, they are just tools. We also need to build processes where people and IT-tools together ensure fluent and efficient communication flow.  

HOW DO YOU SEE ROBIT IN 2023-2024 – WHAT ARE YOUR MAIN EXPECTATIONS IN YOUR FIELD?

I expect flexibility to increase in manufacturing operations. This is done through training people and setting up machines so that they are not dedicated to one product group only but can manufacture several product groups. This helps us adapt to changing market situations and market demand. Better utilization of IT-tools (MRP, machine tracking) decreases the manual workload and helps us better understand the current situation and plan development actions accordingly. Another big improvement I expect to really kick off is an improved forecasting and capacity planning process. As a summary, next couple of years will further develop our processes towards better customer service. Combining of technical tools and our expertise of drilling consumables will make Robit even more reliable partner to our customers.

For more information: Janne Soininen, firstname.lastname@robitgroup.com

 

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