infoBoard im Werkzeugbau in Thailand

InfoBoard in tool making in Thailand

 

In one of the many industrial areas around Bangkok there is a group of employees responsible for the toolmaking of a japanese company, who is in need of a……yes, a planning tool just like infoBoard. Not even the japanese headquarter can help in this difficult situation. The group has to hope that infoBoard International Co. Ltd. is somewhere close.

The online presentation can be difficult to manage: a Teamviewer presentation means I hear questions coming from the computer but I have to answer in the phone receiver. The demo version always convinces everyone very fast and it often happens that employees come to me and confess to have already read through and to have studied the handbook two times.

Despite their personal preparation, the software is ordered short after and a training course in loco is immediately arranged.

InfoBoard International is conveniently located in the immediate proximity of the international airport and of the highways to north, south, east and west.

Everyone arrives fast and without risks to the office, wether you come from the city or from the countryside, because the airport is always well signposted. But the opposite situation can happen and I think it is so amusing to tell your friends and family, when you are back home, about how chaotic and messy the local traffic abroad was and how you had to fight against it .

To get to the clients it took around 100 km of travelling and from km “9” you just had to keep going straight ahead. On the first day I made a mistake. For starters the direction to take was Bangkok City instead of North. It took me 20 minutes to finally find a U-turn, turn around so that I could continue in direction north. I had to pay two road tolls. The first time I took the highway  “1” which was the wrong highway, and the second time, obviously, I went past the destination; there was no highway exit. At this point, like a satellite, I did a first U-turn, turned the car around, then did another U-turn in the other direction, completing a 360 degrees turn. This time I finally managed to leave the highway and get to an industrial area which unfourtanetely wasn’t the one I had to get to; I had been requested to go to the one after.

At the Seven Eleven I met in time with my employee and the interpreter. I updated them fast and told them that my navigation system interpreted numbers differently from what they really were. I didn’t have a precision landing!

Friendly welcome, people spoke Thai, Japanese and then English. We went through  the entire production facility and we were positively surprised: all neat and clean. Accurate labeling of the machinery and with notes (in English!).

Now to the tool making: it is known that production facilities in the USA are clean and tidy. Clients’ names like Panasonic give the idea that there money is earned and riinvested in a clear way.

After visiting the machinery room, we saw on the display panel a fully established infoBoard. Attention had been payed to all details to prepare everything meticulously .

The next 2 training days went by. The English-Thai translation came along smoothly until we tried to explain something in Thai to a japanese employee. I took the deal in my own hands and mimed things using fingers and the mouse and without speaking English, despite all diffculties I think we managed to understand eachother.

I also showed how InfoBoard could be used in the production of machinery for injection moulding. It was our “passport” to Japan. The training brought an end to the IT department of the SAP interface and also ended technical approaches to infoBoard.

We said good bye with the conviction that, that company would earn more money with infoBoard and we were eager to see how the SAP interface would be implemented.

The morning after I suffered from another detour to the “absolutely  close” airport because I looked at the navigation system and not at the signs. Luckily on Saturday mornings the roads are normally empty and it didn’t take a lot of time.

I hope our infoboard platform-designer will be accepted in the universities of Thailand as a teaching tool. In Germany the universities are still fundend by the governement with the so called third-party-funds to keep production plans secret . Michel wake up! Germany has already what people can understand and manage!

In any case, in a japanese company in Thailand employees now understand 55.000 times faster how to make better planning decisions. With Infoboard.