Any improvements that can be made to improve your productivity are always worth it. In fact, it can have a big impact on your competitiveness and your profitability as well. This applies regardless of how big your business is. If you want to find out how you could improve the manufacturing productivity of your company then take a look below.
By Team Savant
Image: Remy Gieling
Assess Your Situation
The first thing that you need to do is try and assess where you stand. Before you can make any decisions on how best to improve your productivity, you have to make sure that you measure your output. This will help you to highlight any potential bottlenecks or pain points. It’s also important that you look at your process, your technology and even the people who you are tasking with bringing everything together. Other secondary points that you have to consider include the methods of communication you are using.
Training
One of the most overlooked ways that you can improve your productivity would be through training your staff. Depending on the industry that you work in, there’s a high chance that your process and your equipment is evolving. It may be that you have new product lines, advances in tech or even legislative changes. Training staff, even the ones who have been with you for a number of years, can easily result in your business practices being followed more closely. This will ultimately add to your efficiency overall.
Product Knowledge
Knowing the actual products that you are making will also help you to yield fantastic results. Manufacturing efficiency ultimately starts with you having staff who are engaged and valued. This doesn’t have to be formal at all, in fact, sometimes simply supervising someone on the job can help you to make sure that everyone is on the same page.
Maintenance
If your machines are always down, then this won’t be doing you any favours at all. You have to make sure that you are doing what you can to try and prioritise maintenance and you also need to make sure that you are not compromising your workflow. Making sure that you have enough fuel on hand will also help you. Look up gas oil online to see if you can get your current fuel for a cheaper price.
Part Picking
The amount of money and time that is wasted through poor organisation can sometimes be staggering. This is true if you know that you have various components or even materials stored at various points of the process. You may find that the time spent retrieving these items can take up a huge portion of your staff’s time. If you want to help yourself then you have to make sure that you devote enough time to your process, and that you also do what you can to try and improve your picking process. It’s very easy for you to reap the benefits from this if you are willing to put in the work to streamline the products that you have to pick and when.