CASE STUDY

Its desired outcome was to eliminate delays and penalties on its manufacturing processes due to process interruptions caused by such common issues as out-of-office personnel and inefficient escalation of issues requiring urgent attention .

But as a modern , process-driven manufacturer , Hyster-Yale found themselves facing the need to update its process automation technology to keep its engineering process orders moving – and to automate and modernize many more of its processes that keep the design , manufacturing and delivery lines humming .

Heavy manufacturing needs a lighter automation solution

The company ’ s objective was to shift from an out-ofsupport , heavy , proprietary BPM platform to a more flexible , open-source digital process automation platform for faster critical process delivery and easier manageability .

Parallel review and approval tasks and automatic delegations should be in place , and looking forward the Hyster-Yale IT team saw more processes waiting to be delivered across the enterprise using the same platform .

Strategic partnerships bring strong technology and key expertise for success

Hyster-Yale ’ s digital automation project was the result of a strategic partnership between Hyster-Yale and Ohio-based Evoke Technologies , a global Information Technology services company with deep experience in delivering automation solutions .

When Evoke experts arrived on the scene , Hyster- Yale was already using a well-known proprietary BPM ( Business Process Management ) platform that had proven to be inflexible and was approaching out-ofsupport status .

A BPM platform is software that drives any kind of business process from its start through to completion , combining people-managed tasks that require user interfaces ( usually through specialized web forms ) with machine-managed tasks ( like input and output for inventory , personnel databases and computer managed equipment ) at each step of the process .

Generally , the more open the platform , the more flexible it is in terms of what it can integrate with , how its user interfaces can be customized , and how easy it is to make changes as the other technologies it is integrated with evolve and change .

Hyster-Yale ’ s goal was to get its BPM processes running on a flexible platform that they could continue to develop and manage processes on without extensive outside help and use it to shift more of its manual and partially automated processes to be fully automated .

For the IT team , open-source plus low code allows the necessary ‘ tinkering with the technology ’

On the previous BPM platform , there were failed tasks in the Engineering Change Order process every day . The system administrator had to manually monitor and restart them to keep the process moving – not ideal for current or future process automation , and not ideal for the system administrator either .

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