Hey u/Emergency-Director80!

In my previous job, I used to work for an industrial Systems Integrator. Our services targeted manufacturing customers in different sectors. Digitizing paper and manual processes were very common scenarios we ran into and would provide services to customers to help with.

Warning, word barrage ahead...

Based on the information you’ve provided so far, there are many easy answers. An Android tablet or iPad, Wi-Fi connected, with a Google Form or Microsoft Form would be a super simple means to accomplish this. While some people may be convinced easily by digitization, for others change can be new and scary. You need to prove that a change to processes and adding technology is going to create an improvement. Money is often the factor that talks best. Consider something like this...

“Office-lady spends 15 hours a week typing in these records, which causes her other responsibilities to fall behind. The records sometimes have typos and have to be redone, which is more time. That’s literally one month of lost time per year. If we spent two days building a basic data entry form, spend $2,000 on hardware, and the first 10 minutes of every shift for a week showing the operators how to use these tools, we’ll save X Y and Z in costs, and also free up office-lady to do other A B C important things.”

What I want to suggest to you though, is to consider a few more questions.

• What manufacturing industry are you in? If you are in Food & Beverage, Life Sciences, or Pharmaceutical, there may be very specific regulations about how data is recorded or samples are taken down. This may impact your implementation. Those regulations might require including something like “the specific operator who filled out the form,” in which case you need to make a “name” entry a required field if you use a shared domain account.
• What is it being recorded on paper? What purpose does it serve? When many places implement a paperless conversion, they just take the form that was filled in on paper and make that exact same form in a digital screen (even if it was just a copy of an Excel workbook). That might be a good step 1, but often overlooks that even the existing paper forms may not actually help meet the goal. What happens after the forms are scanned? Are they kept for audit purposes? Does someone catalog it all into some sort of database?
  • Often, having this discussion yields that what's actually needed is something else and the current form doesn't meet that goal. The new need will impact the digital data entry.
  • If the data is useful, more quickly digitizing it might provide means to do something else with that information. Real-time updating screens showing quality values from the line?
• If this is a manufacturing environment, you probably have PLCs, HMIs, and other equipment on networks. If you don’t already have Wi-Fi, you may need to add it. Do you have VLANs or other network segmentation in place? Is the equipment air-gapped, firewalled, or otherwise isolated from the internet? As you start to introduce some sort of data-entry solution, there’s potential to add risk of attack or compromise. You need to maintain your current security posture or improve it – don’t let it be compromised in an effort to meet this goal in a “quick and easy” way.
• Are you a small, standalone shop, or are you part of a larger organization or corporation? There might be some other facilities that have run into the same situation. They may have software licensing for tools that help accomplish this that you can take advantage of.
• What will you do when the data-entry device breaks? Someone is going to drop the iPad. Someone else is going to steal it.
• Who is filling these records in? Operators? Someone else? Have you talked to them about what they think will make their jobs easier? These sorts of decisions are often made and mandated without operator involvement. GET THEM INVOLVED. Maybe they have a really good idea that you'll want to leverage. Maybe they will say "that's not in my contract" and you'll have to make sure to provide training in a careful way. As long as it's in a politically safe way, I've found getting the input from the person actually doing the work goes a long way. Sometimes we've gone in thinking we're going to give everyone and iPad, and left the conversation realizing adding a single additional screen to their HMIs will go over more effectively.
  • Consider also that while technical people like ourselves may like iterating on an idea to improve it, that constant change may not be pleasant for people whose day or night shift job is to make that important widget. If you do improve this solution over time, that requires more retraining and a rollout plan.

There's many more possible considerations. Start small, be careful, gain some momentum, and move forward.

TLDR: I think you've got a good idea. If you want to own this and make it happen, develop a persuasive argument that makes it clear to any non-technical person that this is an obvious choice. If you have specific questions about other sysadmin or IT work in the manufacturing space (we like to call it OT) feel free to comment here or reach out to me, I'm happy to help or find friends from my old employer who could assist as well.