VOLA: “It pays off to involve management and employees in developing IPW.”

Challenge
The complexity of VOLA’s internally developed systems for documentation, deviations, audits, risk assessments (APV), and environmental management was high. It was difficult to navigate and time-consuming to maintain. Flowcharts did not function well, and we lacked statistics on deviations.

In addition to wanting to stay on the latest platform, we had three non-negotiable requirements for a new management system:

• API-based data exchange

• A consolidated task overview for each employee

• The ability to adjust and create forms ourselves

We also made a strategic decision that the IT department – not the quality department – would be responsible for IPW. Since we manage ERP, CRM, absence systems, and BI, we are best positioned to ensure data reuse and integration.

Solution
We began by defining our value chain, rethinking our process diagrams, and building part of the system. From there, we continuously involved employees and managers for feedback, ideas, and testing. Desired changes were implemented quickly and retested.

For example, production employees helped decide what should appear on their start pages. Our quality team – consisting of a quality coordinator from each production department, several department managers, and our HSQE coordinator – registers deviations and meets regularly. In this way, both managers and employees are actively involved, creating strong ownership.

Result
We build 95% ourselves using IPW standards and require very little support. Through the IPW network group sessions, we gain inspiration from others and share experiences, and we maintain close collaboration with Nicklas. If we have programming questions, even a 15-minute online sparring session provides significant value.

IPW includes a standard maintenance module, but we had specific requirements. For example, we wanted to link multiple forms directly to the machine registry – including service cases, requisitions, risk matrices, and APV. We therefore chose to build this ourselves.

To meet the requirement that all tasks appear in one unified task overview, we have also started developing a project module – a larger initiative that is still underway.