What's in Your Hidden Factory?

Is there significant untapped production hiding within your factory?

The hidden factory represents the untapped capacity of your manufacturing plant – the maximum amount of additional production that can be unlocked without capital investment. The untapped production potential in the hidden factory is typically very significant. In fact, many manufacturers are surprised to learn that they have more capacity in their hidden factory than they are using in their actual factory.

The Hidden Factory represents the untapped potential within your factory. 

The term “hidden factory” was popularized by Armand Feigenbaum in the late 1970’s. Feigenbaum’s concept of the hidden factory was primarily focused on quality, specifically the waste and costs caused by “bad work”, much of which is “hidden” below the surface of day-to-day operations. 

Over time the concept of the hidden factory has broadened to include all waste in manufacturing. In this email, we explore the hidden factory from that broader perspective, specifically focusing on the four areas of lost (or hidden) production potential from an equipment perspective:

• Schedule Loss (time where production could be running – but is not scheduled)
• Availability Loss (time where production should be running - but is not)
• Performance Loss (time where production is running – but not as fast as it should)
• Quality Loss (time where production is running – but one or more pieces are not good the first time through)

Fully utilizing your hidden factory means around-the-clock perfect production – manufacturing only good pieces, as fast as possible, with no down time, every hour of every day. But you don’t have to reach perfect production in order to significantly benefit from your hidden factory.

Learn more about the Hidden Factory on our website.

Benefits of Tapping Into Your Hidden Factory  

The most significant benefit of tapping into your hidden factory is that you can increase throughput without additional capital expenditures. Simply put – making more with what you already have. When you increase throughput, this enables three big benefits:

• Decreased Conversion Cost: Fixed costs are spread over more output (increasing profitability).
• Increased Flexibility: Shorter production runs are possible, improving lead times and reducing inventory.
• Deferred Spend: Increase throughput on existing assets and defer spending on new equipment or facilities.

 At the factory-floor level, tapping into your hidden factory can decrease overtime or eliminate outsourced production. This benefit, though, is more in the realm of traditional OEE. What is specifically unique about the hidden factory is that in addition to OEE Losses it also takes into account Schedule Loss, which makes it an excellent tool for capacity planning.

See Your Hidden Factory with XL   

The Vorne XL Productivity Appliance? monitors all losses that contribute to your hidden factory – both in real time and historically. In fact, the Hidden Factory report, as shown below, shows detailed information about lost production time for each day. 

Automated data capture is especially important when you run parts with different ideal cycle times, as loss calculations are much more complex in this scenario.

This hidden factory report generated by the XL Productivity Appliance? shows a breakdown of all four top-level losses that make up the hidden factory.