3 into 2 will go…
In today’s economic climate it has never been more important to continually look at ways of remaining a low cost provider
By now you’ve probably already addressed labour costs and have found alternative raw material suppliers. Now it’s time to look at the bigger picture. Can you really consolidate 3 facilities in to 2, or eliminate the night shift or weekend working? Well, the answer could well be yes.
Most companies have production capacities set by historical targets. Some have them set with no real data to back them up at all. So when you allegedly hit the 85% efficiency target, what have you actually achieved? By basing your efficiency target on a machine’s real potential, any measure against this will be much more meaningful. The reality is however that the actual efficiency being achieved will fall by half. But that’s not so bad – at least you can now see the headroom you have rather than thinking you’ve reached the ceiling.
If, as a result, you can see your hidden production bottlenecks and capacity issues you can obviously start to take steps to fix them. But, that’s easier said than done – how do you get this insight into where the problems are?
Solutions such as Gemba’s GAIN4 software suite can provide accurate and complete data on process flow, asset utilization and time to fix. By carefully analysing this information you can make decisions on how to address each of these points and, where appropriate, start to make serious inroads into significantly improving your capacity potential.
Once made, constant monitoring needs to take place to evaluate the impact of these changes. Reviewing KPI’s such as cycle times (units per minute), changeover times (SMED) and TAKT times will determine whether enough has been done to remove losses. If so, then at this point the KPI’s can be reset to achieve your objectives (going from a 3 shift pattern to a 2 shift for example).
But that’s not the end, merely the beginning. Unless there’s a culture of continuous improvement, those hard gotten gains will be lost, undoing all the good work and possibly leading to capacity constraints again.
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