LSN Global featured the new Trexa ‘car development platform’ – a fully electric vehicle-development platform that provides designers and manufacturers with the capability to design and develop unique designs without incurring the expense of developing new platforms. The resulting ‘app’ designs dock onto the platform and are fully interchangeable (i.e car to van to flatbed).

Key Challenge

Whilst this looks like a great idea, I think that the key challenge with this technology will be pricing. It is likely that vehicle ‘apps’ will be produced in fairly low volumes and as a result it may be difficult to achieve the economies of scale needed to bring the price down. This could well mean that the resulting vehicles on sale are actually quite expensive compared to traditional vehicles from the volume vehicle manufacturers, rendering the ‘app’ proposition uncompetitive.

It has often been the case in the past that for ‘interchangeable’ products the resulting ‘options’ are actually just as expensive as buying another, brand new, fully functional product, thus rendering interchangablity as pointless.

So the key to this product’s success?

For those manufacturers already competing effectively in the niche electric vehicle market, this platform could be very good news indeed, resulting in significant R&D savings, access to the latest upgradable technology and a faster, more flexible, product development cycle.

In terms of the ‘interchangeable’ aspect of the vehicles, the keys to success are likely to be innovative, high-quality products, produced using low volume, low cost manufacturing, thereby ensuring that the designers of vehicle ‘apps’ really do have a significant price advantage against main stream solutions.

Would I buy one?

Well, if I could design my own vehicle online that I could fully specify from modular components and that was delivered direct to my door, that would be very cool indeed. However, for me, an Audi R8 or Tessla might be slightly higher up my wishlist!

However, it is important to recognise the scalability issues of paper as a technology: paper can only be in one place at one time so it doesn’t work well across multiple sites; revision control is tricky; and it can be hard to back up – do you have duplicate copies of everything if worst came to the worst?

Even if we cannot remove paper entirely, there are things we can do to consign it to a supporting role rather than the main deal within a business.

Steps to creating a paperless office

1. Analysing your processes

The first idea to grasp is the fact that paper usually relates to a process or processes within your organisation. Understanding this will provide a solid foundation for beginning to deal with the paper as the processes themselves provide the structural foundation for creating a paperless office. By analysing the papers for clues about the activities the paper itself represents and following this paper through the system, you can outline your processes, giving you an accurate view of ‘now’.

2. Revising your processes

The next step is to revise your processes in order to maximise efficiency. This includes:

• Eliminating bottle necks and their resulting backlogs
• Removing unecessary steps within the process(es)
• Assessing crossover and interdependency of processes within the wider organisation to ensure integration
• And, overall, designing as lean a process as possible.

Value stream mapping may be a good tool to use at this stage. The people involved in each process within your organisation will also be a vital source of information and feedback as they are the people on the ground who are involved in the processes day-in, day-out.

3. Integrating paper and technology

Having created a coherent set of lean processes, the next challenge is to reduce the use of paper where possible. This can be done by assessing the processes to find out which parts of them can be automated and then developing an IT and technology solution that has your best practice processes inherently embedded into its system. In other words, the IT and technology solution reflects and is built around your processes, rather than the processes being built around the technology.

4. Sustainable continuous improvement

Once you have found a solution that works for your organisation as a whole and that maximises your efficiency and effectiveness, it is important to maintain the momentum of improvement. Ongoing assessment and revision will ensure that as your organisation grows and develops your processes continue to support the delivery of your organisation’s objectives. New technology is also continually emerging that may provide a solution to paper based systems where a solution did not previously exist. Staying abreast of these developments allows you to continually improve organisational performance and efficiency.

5. Reducing risk

Although it is not always possible to eliminate the use of paper completely, you should not be relying on paper for mission critical functions. However, neither should you be relying on technology without a business continuity plan in place. Whatever system and solution you are using, you should always make sure that fail-safes and redundancies are built into the process(es).

If you would like any advice or support in creating a paperless office for your organisation, please contact me or call me on 02476 100 193 – I would love to help!

I was reading an article today by Chris Dannen of Fast Company about a sophisticated broadband diagnosis website launched by Google and two non-profit organisations. The new website is called Measurement Lab. Apparently it still needs some work but check it out anyway – it may give you a slightly stronger hand when dealing with difficult ISPs.