Thinking processes, and Costs

Costs in a manufacturing process

There are many ways to reduce your costs in a manufacturing process. By simply altering your approach to production, you can bring the overall cost down.

Reducing costs in a manufacturing process is possible if you plan and review your current workflow. Take the time to review your workflow to see if any costs are unnecessary. Some call this Value Stream Mapping. In it's simplest form it examines inputs and routing, and can be done simply with post-it notes. Lay out the post-it notes for your work area to see the inputs and outputs of the workflow. If you can't "see" the process in this way, just start by finding your bottleneck and working out from there - this is an oversimplification but it does work, and it will also highlight capacity constraint resources which can also be examined for throughput.

Toyota also originally coined the term Autonomation, and it basically referred to the way humans work with the machinery. Often, changing the way we work with the machines can make them faster, safer, and more reliable.

And, going back to the flow through the process, examine inputs and outputs and whether a step is even needed. Are there any defects being passed along? Are there any wastes? One of my favorite quick "bite-sized" videos that highlights just this type of re-engineering in a simple process is by Tom Hughes :

https://youtu.be/FsL6W_7n62c

As a word of caution though, do not let just the cost of something inside a process sway you too much on whether it should or shouldn't be done. The decision should be made on how it affects the overall production.

An easy example of this is on speeds for cutting materials. You may find that at a bottleneck the tool doesn't last as long when cutting fast, and your inclination may be to slow down the tool in order to make it last longer, or in order to replace the tool less often. This would be a mistake; at a bottleneck, more than any other area of the plant, you must only work on "good" parts and your goal should be to maintain or speed it up as long as there are no other undesirable effects.

The cost of replacing say a $100 tool is nothing compared to the entire process losing time and throughput, as the overall throughput of the entire production line may be worth $10,000 per hour, and trying to make a tool last an entire shift by running at say 80% speed, in perspective may save that $100, but at the expense of an overall throughput reduction over the course of a day of up to $16,000!

This is the ultimate example of penny-wise and pound-foolish. A better approach would be to find a better tool or design a better process where the tool can produce more, at a higher quality, and possibly moving the tool change outside the operating hours so as to not affect overall production at all. Or change the design so that this step, especially at the bottleneck, isn't even required. Toyota is only one company that relentlessly pursues quality and throughput without excess to lower costs, and many other companies have tried and failed to implement these thinking processes.

The bottom line is that to affect costs in a process, the process must be known, and steps need to be taken to move towards overall system throughput, not just at a part of the process. It does you no good only looking at a single area for costs, if it doesn't affect overall system throughput - the customer only really wants a finished product. A more circular approach that takes the entire interdependent system into account would be more advantageous.

Your thoughts? Can this be simplified? What's an "undesirable effect" in your process? What do you do to mitigate this?