Regardless of what manufacturing industry your business operates in, if you want to increase the overall profitability, you need to focus on increasing the productivity of your operations. Striving for improvement on the production floor specifically would involve examining the flow, suggesting improvements, training of employees, and investing energies in maintenance and organization.
Following are the five steps to help you design a more productive and successful manufacturing floor for your business.
Examine the Existing Workflow
The first step towards improvement requires the analysis of your current systems. Identify the bottleneck points that cause disturbance in the workflow. Instead of a shallow analysis, try and understand how your existing staff, technology, processes and communication tools work together to deliver outputs and what can be changed in the setup to arrive at the desired levels.
Value mapping is an effective strategy for monitoring points of process improvements. It enables managers to record how a minute change in the input affects the overall process.
Update Business Processes
Based on the results you receive from the analysis of your existing system, make an updated process plan. However, it is important that this plan is designed after taking in opinions of the project and floor managers, people who have an idea of what it is to work on the ground.
The new business process could involve re-assigning resources to different fields of the manufacturing floors, changing departmental budgets or becoming ISO certified. Also ensure to evaluate and systematically interpret the results of these changes.
Invest in Continued Employee Education
Manufacturing industry relies a great deal on the technology it uses in the form of machineries for cutting, integrating or assembling on its floors. Therefore, to keep the productivity of manufacturing employees high, it is critical that they are trained in the use of the latest production technology that is employed by the company. Technological advancements often lead to newer skills in demand from the workforce; your employees would therefore be much more productive if they have access to the relevant trainings.
Invest in Smart Maintenance
Higher the number of hours you waste in downtime, the larger will be the loss of production and output. Furthermore, breakdowns also increase the costs that are associated with repair work and they also tend to increase budget allocation to preventive measures. Putting in careful-use habits among employees and regular maintenance checks could prevent or at least cut down the above mentioned expenses.
Stay Organized
Staying organized can save up a large amount of money. There are management philosophies that aim to cut down waste and make the production systems much more efficient. Management principles such as Lean, Six Sigma and Kaizen can be implemented to better manage the work flow.