When stock runs out on the floor, an employee gets up and goes to find someone from the warehouse.
When a machine makes a worrying noise, the operator goes to find maintenance.
When there’s a shortage of packaging, someone goes to find the foreman.
It’s the same routine every time: a person leaves their station and heads off.
Sounds normal.
And that’s exactly the problem.
Walking around the floor is justified because someone has to report the problem, because someone has to find someone else, because otherwise nothing will happen. But it’s also very costly. Every time an employee leaves their station, production comes to a standstill.
And since no one records it, no one knows how much time it really is. There’s no event in the system. There’s no entry in the report. There’s just an employee who came back after a few minutes, or after fifteen minutes, because the foreman was on the other side of the hall.
Verbal communication is a hidden cost that grows with every shift
In most manufacturing plants and warehouses, no one questions the use of verbal communication. That’s how it’s been for years; everyone is used to it, and it somehow works. The problem is that “somehow” is the most expensive word in production management.
Imagine a warehouse where thirty people work a single shift. On average, each of them gets up from their station twice per shift to report something, ask a question, or wait for a response. Each such incident takes, optimistically speaking, five minutes. That’s three hundred minutes of lost work time per shift. Five hours. With three shifts, that’s fifteen hours a day that simply vanish.
And that’s just the time spent walking. Add to that the waiting time, because the foreman doesn’t always respond immediately, because the right person is on the other side of the hall, because someone has to first understand the problem and decide what to do about it. The total of these downtimes is much greater, and no one records them.
Who Works on the Factory Floor and Why It Matters for Communication
Simply walking around the factory floor is a waste of time. But the problem becomes much bigger when we consider the realities of today’s manufacturing labor market.
For several years now, Polish manufacturing and logistics have relied heavily on temporary workers, foreign workers, and middle-aged and older individuals who have spent their entire working lives without digital systems. In 2024, over 320,000 work permits were issued to foreign nationals in Poland (MRPiPS, 2024), and manufacturing plants and warehouses are one of the main sectors employing them.
A SW Research study shows that 41% of employers cite the language barrier as the greatest difficulty in working with foreign employees (swresearch.pl). But the language barrier isn’t just a problem when talking to a foreman. It’s also a barrier when interacting with any digital system that requires reading, writing, and understanding messages in a foreign language.
Add to this temporary workers, hired for a few weeks or months, who often have no experience with IT systems at work. For them, learning to use a new interface is a real challenge, and their motivation to do so is low, since they’ll be leaving in a few weeks anyway.
The result?
The company implements the system, but only part of the team uses it. The rest carry on as before: they walk and talk.
A Five-Button Remote Control—Simplicity That Works
The solution to this problem doesn’t have to be complicated. We recently proposed a simple, quick-to-implement solution with no technical barriers for employees at a company facing exactly this scenario—a large group of temporary and non-native-speaking workers, communication relying solely on verbal contact, and supervisors who had no real-time insight into what was happening on the workstations.
Each workstation was equipped with a Satel wireless remote control featuring five physical buttons. Each button corresponds to a specific event, such as: lack of materials, lack of packaging, equipment failure, quality issue, or calling a supervisor. One press. One signal. No screen, no login, no language to understand.
After pressing the button, the AndonCloud system takes care of the rest. The workstation’s status changes immediately on the central dashboard visible on the monitors in the hall. The appropriate person receives an SMS, email, or browser push notification tailored to the type of event. A shortage of goods goes to logistics. A breakdown goes to maintenance. A quality issue is sent to quality control. No one has to walk around the hall looking for the right person. No one has to explain anything.
The Andon system colors—green, yellow, red—appear on the monitors. They are immediately understandable, without words, without training, in any language. This is a standard used in manufacturing worldwide.
This solution hits the mark. It’s simple, fast, and hassle-free. No major installation work, no huge investment, and no training that has to be repeated for every new person on the line.
What changes when the system replaces walking around the facility
The first thing that changes is the response time to incidents. Instead of waiting for an employee to find the right person, a notification reaches the specific individual within seconds. The system measures the time from the report to the response and records it in the incident history. For the first time, the facility sees how long its downtime actually lasts.
Second is full visibility of the floor in one place. The shift manager, foreman, or operations director sees the current status of every workstation on the dashboard without walking around, without making calls, and without gathering information from people. If a workstation has been idle for twenty minutes without a response, the system sends an alert. Before anyone has a chance to ask what’s going on.
The third is data that didn’t exist before. Every button press is recorded down to the minute. After a month, the plant knows which workstation most frequently reports stockouts, at what time breakdowns most often occur, and how much time on average elapses from the report to the response. This is the foundation for data-driven decisions rather than management based on gut feeling.
Why it works where other systems have failed
Most communication and monitoring systems require the operator to do one thing that seems simple at first glance: use the interface. A touchscreen, logging in, selecting from a list, entering a comment. For someone who works with a computer every day, this is no problem. But for a person who doesn’t speak Polish, hasn’t used systems at work before, and has been in the country for two weeks, it’s a barrier that simply prevents them from using the system.
A five-button remote control has no such barrier. There is no screen to understand. There is no language to know. Five buttons and five functions—and that’s all it takes for the facility to have complete, up-to-date information on what’s happening at every workstation.
That is why this solution works wherever people work: on production lines, in warehouses, in logistics centers, on packaging and sorting lines. Anywhere where communication today relies on walking and talking, rather than on a system that operates regardless of the operator’s language, age, or experience.
How can you reduce downtime that doesn’t show up in reports?
Downtime that doesn’t show up in reports is often more costly than the downtime a plant officially reports. There’s one key difference: no one reports the former because there’s no way to do so. A five-button remote changes that. And it usually turns out that the problem was bigger than anyone realized.
If this topic is of interest to you, please feel free to contact us. We can talk and work together to see if this solution is a good fit for your facility.
Sources:
SW Research, Foreigners in the Polish Labor Market — swresearch.pl
Ministry of Family, Labor, and Social Policy, Work Permits for Foreigners 2024 — dane.gov.pl
