The importance of production efficiency cannot be overstated; it means you are making the most out of your resources. Intouch Monitoring shares five ways you can improve your production efficiency by 5-30% without adding any machinery or investing any money.
As a manufacturer, improving production efficiency should be a top priority. Did you know?
- You have the power to improve your manufacturing efficiency by 5-30%.
- One of the most important factors in any business is productivity.
- If you can optimise your production for maximum efficiency, you will be ahead of the game in terms of growth and revenue.
The following five tips will help you increase your factory productivity by 5-30% using your existing resources:
- Minimise machine downtime.
- Predict and manage bottlenecks.
- Optimise your planning.
- Identify losses.
- Schedule downtime for maintenance.
1. Minimise machine downtime
Every minute, every second that a machine is down can have severe consequences for your company’s bottom line. From missing deadlines to wasting valuable human resources, ensuring that unplanned downtime is kept to a minimum has got to be a priority for your manufacturing operation. There are three ways of increasing machine uptime:
- Downtime alerts that tell you as soon as a machine is down, so you can fix the problem as soon as it happens.
- Schedule downtime for maintenance. Scheduling regular maintenance decreases the overall amount of machine downtime.
- Analysing machine performance reports allows you to spot trends and make changes to increase machine uptime.
2. Predict and eliminate bottlenecks
Bottlenecks clog up productivity and is one of the major reasons for job delays, increase in production costs and manufacturing unpredictability, yet it is something that is often overlooked. There are three ways of predicting and eliminating bottlenecks:
- Having visibility of your manufacturing operation means that you will spot potential bottlenecks in your schedule, machine’s historic performance, department stressors and make changes to avoid them becoming an issue.
- Minimise downtime by having downtime alerts, doing preventative maintenance and having replacement parts on hand so machines can be fixed immediately.
- Scheduling. Having an overview of your scheduling means you can easily rearrange it so that your production flows better whilst still meeting your business demands.
3. Optimise your schedule
Ideally, your manufacturing plant should operate at full capacity. Your schedule should make your manufacturing process flow with maximum efficiency, balancing your production needs with your resources cost-effectively. In almost every production setting, scheduling is best done flexibly and in real-time. Having a real-time overview of your schedule makes moving things around easy to:
- Fill any gaps – rearrange production so that gaps are minimised.
- Add late jobs.
- Rearrange production in case of unexpected downtime.
4. Identify losses
There are few things in manufacturing more frustrating than when you know there is an issue with one of your machines but cannot seem to find it. Or when you can see that one machine is working better than the others, but you don’t know why. Having accurate reports and analytics software pinpoints the source of losses allowing you to fix the problem immediately.
5. Schedule downtime for maintenance
Regular planned maintenance not only safeguards the quality of products produced and helps minimise unplanned downtime but also helps:
- Keep equipment healthy.
- Extends equipment lifetime.
- Reduces overall machine downtime.
- Schedule downtime at convenient times.
Implementing these five things will transform your factory’s efficiency:
- Low machine utilisation > high machine utilisation.
- High level of machine downtime > low machine downtime.
- Low or inconsistent production rates > consistent production rates.
- High levels of scrap > low scrap levels.
- Missing deliveries > deliver on time, every time.
- Unnecessary quality issues > zero defects.
We know how crucial your job is and what is at stake if you don’t get it right. We also know that the only way to be truly efficient is by having the right information. Without accurate information in a format that you can use, you are just guessing and wasting time, money and resources. Click here to start your 60-day free trial of the Intouch MES system and discover how it will make implementing the above changes easy. Intouch supplies flexible and easy-to-use monitoring, scheduling, reporting and analytics software that significantly improves overall equipment effectiveness (OEE). The Intouch software is suitable for many industries and processes.