Durban 22 April 2010:  ApplyIT, the South African software solution provider to the process manufacturing industry, has further enhanced its plant operations suite OpSUITE^TM to incorporate an electronic meeting minutes (EMM) module, an optimised solution designed specifically to improve meeting effectiveness and operational performance.

Meetings in any industry are notoriously time-consuming and can often be unproductive. On plants, information regarding operations is not always available when critical decisions need to be made. Situations on site change significantly between meetings, rendering what was decided in a recent meeting out of date. The larger the number of meeting attendees, the greater the opportunity cost – and the higher the probability that at least one person is missing information needed to make a decision.  

Similarly, without a common database of minutes and action items, issues are often not followed through and there is a lack of personal accountability for situations.

OpSUITE^TM EMM is designed to improve the efficacy of meetings and raise the bar on communication between individuals during and between meetings, making time spent on site more productive.  The solution links meeting agendas directly to plant activities.  During meetings, information from plant and business systems is automatically retrieved into pre-configured agendas.  Information can be consolidated and presented as key performance indicators (KPIs), allowing easy drilldown during meetings to the underlying source data.

Notes and actions are either supplied ahead of the meeting, or captured by the co-ordinator during the meeting, improving agility and operational follow through.  Specific meeting items can be rescheduled into the agenda of other meetings whenever necessary, actioned items are tracked and can be escalated if unattended.  Any operating concern noted in the FlexiLOG^TM shift logs may be escalated onto the agenda of a meeting, where it is exposed to a wider forum and appropriate action may be taken.

Integration into ApplyIT’s OpSUITE^TM, specifically OptiRUN, IntelliPERMIT^TM and SmartSURE^TM allows for maintenance, safety, quality, environmental and other key operating parameters to be efficiently reported through EMM to routine production meetings.  The advantages of integrating EMM with other OpSUITE^TM modules are numerous. For example, meetings can review personnel on shift, look at training and competency requirements, maintenance work orders, outstanding permits-to-work, safety incidents and shift log entries.

ApplyIT product development manager Scott Bredin says OpSUITE^TM EMM’s ability to pull operational info into a central repository where it can be made actionable is what makes the application unique.

“A typical example might be a person on night shift noticing a problem requiring attention.  Rather than noting the issue in the log and depending on others to take the issue forward for discussion, OpSUITE™ EMM enables details of the problem to be sent directly onto the agenda of the morning production meeting, where it will be prioritised and acted on without delay.  OpSUITE^TM EMM has enabled a radical change in the way information is gathered for meetings that are held on site, and the speed at which priority items can be identified and handled in the meeting,” says Bredin.