Maintaining efficiency in the manufacturing industry is critical because it can affect customer satisfaction and business output. Below are tips to help you enhance process efficiency within your business or company.
Remember, achieving efficiency in your processes can take time and continuous effort. However, the results are beneficial to your company and guarantee your customers maximum experience.
Analyze Data to Determine Areas that Require Improvement
Until recently, manufacturers who were focused on collecting operational data used confined data sets. Today, however, you can easily analyze data to determine areas of weakness or establish solutions required for ultimate efficiency.
A mining company for instance leveraged on data to figure out that there was ultimate performance when oxygen at the mine was at peak levels. The company would later change its leach retrieval process, an action that saw a 3.7 percent increase in average yield within three months.
Without a comprehensive analysis of data, the company may not have determined the processes they needed to change to enhance efficiency. To get started, companies need to establish the problems that data evaluation can solve, for instance, a process that is cost draining.
The characteristics of that process should be accurately evaluated, before the final step which involves analyzing the data to understand how to match the improvements with the findings.
For instance, many people will execute irrelevant steps when programming a machine to ensure that it can perform multiple functions. This can involve upgrading the equipment to make it more versatile and furnishing employees with refresher courses.
Adopt Robotic Process Automation
RPA (Robotic Process Automation) is the automation of manual and repetitive tasks through the use of software. According to Universal Robots, the adoption of robotic process automation hit approximately $800 million in 2018 which was a huge growth from the $542 million expenditure in 2017.
Some manufacturing based tasks are ideal for robotic process automation such as regulatory compliance, transport management, and purchase order processing collaborative robots and the robotic arm can be used in factories to speed up completion of tasks. Robotic process automation can be applied in various ways in factories.
However, it’s important to evaluate their potential before choosing one. In the end, you should be able to identify the appropriate options for the robotic process automation. RPA can be used in error-prone processes to enhance accuracy.
Adopt Teamwork for Goal Achievement
Before setting company goals, it’s important to identify where the obstacles lie and lay down strategies to establish solutions. You can identify obstacles in your company by:
- Establishing the process or machine with the longest wait times
- Figuring out the process or machine that utilizes the biggest percentage of its volume.
- Establishing areas with backlogged work and finding the source of the backlogs caused by both humans and machine
Deal with the overly expensive obstacle first and task your employees with finding goals which can reduce or eradicate the problem areas. Redistribute the adopted changes progressively to avoid causing disruptions on the already existing processes.
Deliberate with each team on a regular basis to establish how closer to the predetermined goal you are getting. In the 20th century, team leaders commonly used the command and control team management method.
However, it created low morale among employees instead of motivating them since it involved ordering around and punishment from the team leaders. Today, however, companies are adopting the engage and create team management method which is more favorable and involves team communication.
In engage and create method, team leaders encourage and value opinions of their team members. There’s free engagement among the team members, leaders, and the entire company workers. You can opt for the interested engagement team management approach which focuses on listening to feedback to your team and responding accordingly.
Finally
The most efficient processes will fail if machines break down following poor maintenance procedures. Therefore, companies should ensure that their machines are adequately maintained for continued process efficiency. They can start by scheduling routine checks for equipments and laying down standards to determine conditions that should trigger immediate inspection of equipment such as abnormal tension levels or unusual wear patterns.
