How to Improve Manufacturing Efficiency – Guide
No matter what business you are in, increasing efficiency is critical. After all, this can imply a reduction in expenses, an increase in the productivity of the team and, in the case of manufacturing, an increase in income. To strengthen their bottom line, leading manufacturing companies have long been looking for innovative ways to increase efficiency. In fact, hourly output for manufacturing employees has grown more than 2.5 times since 1987. However, the terrain is continually changing, and companies that want to stay ahead must constantly reinvent themselves.
Ways to improve manufacturing efficiency
Below, we explore five areas of your business that you can improve to improve manufacturing efficiency.
1. Identify and eliminate waste
Here are some ways to identify and eliminate shapes:
2. Evaluate your production line
The production lines at your facility are your bread and butter. Productivity is the most important metric to track when studying your production lines. Essentially, it measures the average number of units produced during a specific period of time. This allows you to immediately identify problems on your production line when yield is not up to pair on certain machines. In addition, you can track capacity utilization. By calculating the total production capacity of each factory at any given time, you can see which production lines are running at the highest possible output. Combined with throughput, you have two ways to track production line efficiency. To help identify the machines and operations that are slowing these two metrics down, you may want to adopt simulation modeling as a business practice. Simulating the optimal performance of your production line will identify which of these processes need improvement.
3. Identify bottlenecks
By identifying any problems on your production line, you will naturally discover your biggest bottlenecks in production. Bottlenecks are failures in your production line, supply chain, or any business process that in turn prevents another process from doing its job. For example, in a factory, a specific machine may need maintenance, interrupting its operation for half a day. Any process that requires that particular machine to be running is stuck, unable to run. That machine is then the bottleneck. There are many forms of bottlenecks – an administrator who is needed for approvals that get sick is another example. Once you’ve identified the most common bottlenecks, you can work to remove them and improve efficiency by eliminating excess downtime due to bottlenecks.
4. Improving Training Practices
How your employees function ultimately determines efficiency across your organization. Untrained employees equate to low efficiency and vice versa. Optimal employee performance starts with empowering all team members throughout the manufacturing process. This isn’t as simple as creating a booklet that someone trains from – highly effective workers require supervised on-the-job training. But first, you must create standardized practices across your organization, from top to bottom. After all, you can’t expect every employee to work efficiently when different managers institute different practices and the same task is approached in different ways. In addition, PWC suggests that to empower your employees to create sustainable efficiency, they should ask themselves the following questions: Give your employees the ability to formulate ideas that can improve efficiency. After all, no one will know better the ins and outs of your specific operations.
5. Focus on quantifying and organizing all aspects of the workplace
You would be surprised at how inefficient your organization can be simply due to bad organization habits. For example, you might be wasting precious time on a production line for no reason other than that a tool someone must use regularly is on the opposite side of the factory. Or your file system, whether through Google Drive or otherwise, requires employees to spend unnecessary time looking for documents in a cacophony of folders. First, you must quantify all aspects of your business. Whether you do it with a point value or a dollar value, every aspect of your manufacturing process must be quantified. This will immediately give you insight into what works and what doesn’t. Second, everything must be organized. From shop floor to head office, you don’t want to let inefficiencies show up simply because of clutter. Quantifying and organizing your manufacturing process may be two separate activities, but they both achieve the same goal: long-term manufacturing efficiency.
Final note
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