How Can Manufacturing Managers Know If They “Won The Day”?

Amidst the busyness of a day on the manufacturing production floor, one pressing question often remains unanswered for many manufacturing managers: "How do I know if we won the day?"?

It can be difficult for manufacturing managers to gauge exactly whether the manufacturing plant is running well or not, especially on a day-to-day basis. They usually need some concrete indicators to gauge their daily performance, but without proper systems in place, they often find themselves groping in the dark.

What Are The Traits of a Successful Manufacturing Plant??

Most plants are worrying about the same few things: Are they running well? Have they had projects completed? Have they made progress on goals? Are my processes running like they are designed to? How is my team doing??

These are all very general and overarching concerns, to truly understand the status of the plant, managers need to focus on specific metrics that reveal the health of their operations.?

Let’s look at just a few standard industry benchmarks that could define a successful factory floor:

Communication with Team: Just like any organization, effective communication ensures that everyone is on the same page. Regular meetings, clear instructions, and open channels for feedback are crucial. Are the teams aligned with the day’s objectives? Is there a smooth flow of information from the top down and vice versa?

Visibility of Information: Managers should have access to real-time data on production status, inventory levels, and workforce deployment. This visibility allows for timely decision-making and quick responses to emerging issues. On a similar note, workers should also have visibility on the indicators and benchmarks that managers are looking at.?

Process Efficiency: Are the manufacturing processes running as expected? Efficiency metrics like cycle time, throughput, and downtime are key to assessing plant efficiency.?

Employee Well-being: Manufacturing workers are the heart of the operation, as the ones carrying out day-to-day tasks. Are workers engaged, motivated, and adequately trained to carry out their designated tasks? Regular assessments and feedback loops can help ensure a supportive work environment.

Safety: In a manufacturing plant, safety is an absolute non-negotiable. This includes tracking safety incidents, conducting regular audits, and fostering a culture of safety among employees. A safe workplace not only protects employees but also enhances overall efficiency.

The Struggle For Managers

Out on the manufacturing shop floor, there are many different processes happening all at once, each of them with different metrics of success and different areas of concern. From one area to another, the concerns can vary widely, from waste management to maintenance reliability and even safety and training issues.?

If a manager doesn’t have any data flow or a way to track projects, processes, or shop floor data, there is no way to get visibility on their progress! At the end of the day, they are essentially living in a gray area, hoping that things are getting done and moving toward their goals, but how can they really know???

Where can they put efforts to improve if they don’t know where their baseline is?? How can a plant get more efficient if it is not currently measuring its efficiency??

How Thrive Helps

This is where Thrive comes into play, as the perfect manufacturing tool to help you enhance visibility of shop floor processes.?

By offering tools for tracking processes and projects to completion, as well as reports and dashboarding to make the data visible to the team, Thrive empowers managers with the insights they need to know if they have made progress. With Thrive, the question of whether you "won the day" becomes less of a doubt and more of a confident affirmation.

Whether it's production rates, safety incidents, or machine performance, managers can access all the necessary data at a glance to ensure processes are running as they should. Thrive can help use the data to make a customized report or dashboard, such as non-conformance tracking or safety audit results.?

However, and this may be the case more often than not, the information managers need might not all be in one system, but how can managers roll that out? In Thrive, managers can build a personalized system, such as a shift audit or daily summary report, which includes a personalized set of questions that help managers take an overall look at the shop floor. This makes it much easier for managers to gain visibility on the success of the day, based on certain key metrics.?

Greater visibility to manufacturing managers may not mean much without ensuring that team members and workers on the shopfloor have visibility of these success metrics as well. With greater visibility across the board, managers can translate any gaps into actionable insights for workers to close the loop.?

?All in all, this creates a shop floor culture that cares about a culture of engaged team members and processes that are running well to help you win the day.

Want to learn more about the functional areas of Thrive and how they can help you create a picture of your manufacturing shop floor today? Visit our website today!