Overview
Value Added Management (VAM) is a plant-floor app for lean-manufacturing teams. Instead of one narrow tool, it bundles the core continuous-improvement methods — value-added analysis, 5S audits, and H&SE / TPM — into a single mobile app that measures each activity, charts the results, and turns them into shareable reports. Auditors and improvement engineers run their analyses on the floor, across multiple companies, and the app keeps their data in the cloud. I built the mobile app at Voth, the software studio where I worked, for an industrial client.
The problem
Lean audits and value-added studies were traditionally done on paper and spreadsheets: someone times an activity by hand, scores a 5S or H&SE checklist, then goes back to a desk to tally it, chart it, and format a report. That’s slow, error-prone, and hard to consolidate across teams and sites. The client needed all of it — timing, auditing, charts, and reports — in one app that worked where the work happens.
What I built
- Value-added (VA) analysis — capture an activity’s steps and compute how much of the time is genuinely value-added versus waste, surfaced as a clear percentage.
- 5S audits — run 5S audits on the floor with reference/help photos and photo capture
(
image_picker), scored and visualized with radar charts. - H&SE / TPM module — Health, Safety & Environment and Total Productive Maintenance checks in the same tool, so teams cover more of the lean toolkit without switching apps.
- Statistics dashboards — per-company dashboards built with Syncfusion charts (plus radar charts) to visualize value-added, 5S, and H&SE/TPM results over time.
- PDF & Excel export — generate reports from any analysis and export them to PDF (
pdf) and Excel/XLSX (excel), then share them natively from the device. - Accounts & cloud data — Firebase Auth for login/register and Firestore/Storage to sync analyses, audits, and photos across the client’s companies and auditors.
- Premium plan (in-app purchases) — built a freemium model with
in_app_purchasewhere a premium plan unlocked saving analyses and viewing statistics. It shipped, though the subscriptions were later dropped since the product was still new. - Reliability — Firebase Crashlytics for crash telemetry and Hive for on-device local storage.
Impact
VAM put a full lean-manufacturing toolkit in a plant worker’s pocket — replacing paper checklists and desk-bound spreadsheets with on-the-floor capture that charts itself and exports a finished PDF or Excel report in a tap. Bundling value-added analysis, 5S, and H&SE/TPM into one app turned a scattered, manual workflow into a single, shareable, cloud-backed one.
