POWERFUL IMPORTANT & VITAL TOOL (road map) FOR THE INCREASE OF EFFICIENCY IN PRODUCTION/MANUFACTURING PLANTS

SHARING MY PROFESSIONAL EXPERTISE OF WHAT HAD BEEN LEARNT ABOUT POWERFUL IMPORTANT & VITAL TOOL (roadmap) FOR THE INCREASE OF EFFICIENCY IN PRODUCTION/MANUFACTURING PLANTS

Achieving production efficiency is not an easy assignment for any kind of Organization and the data’s show that how most companies are consuming 50% of their key resources, i.e. Labour and Equipment.

An observation data based taken in a variety of industries shows that the real Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) is approximately 60%. This performance level has an immediate impact on labour, which typically runs at 50-55% productive. It’s not that people aren’t working and the problem is toiling away on non-value added tasks such as looking for information, fixing errors and fighting fires.

The best performing companies will achieve around 85% OEE against fixed determined efficiency level of 100%. In what way it can be done?

The important most powerful & vital ways to get started on the road map to efficiency to gain a measurable advantage for becoming more competitive in making bigger bottom line and are as follows:

1. Constructing the foundation:

The foundation for production efficiency needs to address processes, planning and management behaviour patterns.

Need Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) that aligns finance and operations, tying revenue and cost targets of the financial world to the activity-based measures of operations. Why is this so important?

Because how it translates sales forecasts into resource requirements for setting up the stage for effective production planned scheduling.

To ensure smooth running processes need to take the time to understand and observe the downtime that occurs at the constraints. Focus on where the bottlenecks occur, when machines jam and workers moving away from the line, seeking information or parts. Of course, production does not work in a vacuum; supporting functions will have similar process issues that tend to slow or degrade information that keeps OEE front and centre. So, focusing on process and removing operating problems at the constraints enables them all to work together with reduced incidents of downtime.

Finally, needs the managers who actively manage to control most of the resources of that company’s consumption and the decision making here is critical. Active management includes developing a superior plan, setting clear expectations with appropriate direction, and following up to ascertain variances and performance issues. In thousands of studies, observed that managers spend less than 2% of their time actively managing their process. Instead, they spend most of their time in reacting to unplanned events (fighting fires), performing administrative tasks or ploughing through work of assigned.

2. Business plan matches with the schedule:

Most of the companies already have a scheduled plan and the problem here is that often it doesn’t work because of failing to match with the revenue or cost needs of the business. Businesses having “MRP and ERP” systems will be handicapped by having inaccurate data, poor inventory accuracy, inaccurate lead times, and bills of material, yield or order quantities. These challenges will lead to over production or under production which will quickly lead to excessive scheduled plan changes resulting in major cause for downtime.

If the parameters are right, the next task is to ensure that the scheduled plan’s expectation (typically in units) matches with the revenue expectations of the business in value of money. In turn the scheduled plan must also to match with the costs that the business has committed to consume in the form of material, labour or equipment etc.,

3. Visualization of important measures:

Business in the world over has had more and more data for measuring their business. The downside is that it is often difficult to foresee which data point is the one that is much more important. To address this, needs to get clarity on the key drivers of profit, things like downtime at the constraint, yields and schedule attainment. Sure, that have the right measures to make it visible and at the point of execution, visibility will be in the form of operating values. At the leadership level, visibility may be in the form of money value needs to be translated of what is seen at the point of execution. 

4. Management of downtime & other characters:

The systematized scheduled plan which made it visible will paves the way for finding downtime how to tackle. A manager who actively manages the scheduled plan will find positive and negative variances into scheduled plan of output. Positive variances need to be understood so that it can be duplicated and built into the planning process; the negative variances need to be analyzed in solving the problem. Problems may be related to skills deficiencies which trigger training events and may be related to faulty or troublesome methods, observations/communications, sigma or lean event, employee behaviour between manager and staff. At last, the problem may relate to planning or upstream or downstream processes that will trigger an escalation to a more senior level.

5. An Objective Viewpoint:

Inclusive of operational problems on work in an environment daily routine and are eyeball deep in the pressures of meeting production requirements; however, it may be hard to determine the root causes. That’s why it’s good to bring a third party who can take a fresh look at the situation by viewing things from a new perspective with the knowledge & experience had with other organizations that help to identify problems and solutions more rapidly.

Conclusion:

Above mentioned more important powerful ways will be a more vital road map for achieving good efficiency to gain a measurable advantage in terms of good performance for an Organization.

SUNDARAMURTHY VELMURUGAN, LEATHER PROFESSIONAL CONSULTANT from PONDICHERRY; [email protected] & [email protected] Whatsapp: +918973231705