Productivity-What Can I Do Today To Make My Shop The Most Money?
In the current economy, many machines are down for lack of work. This makes it essential to assure that the ones with work are up and running every minute that they should.
Can you meet this simple challenge in your shop? For every production machine that you have scheduled for operations, does it have actual production uptime of greater than 50%? Actually measured in minutes of tools in the cut. Reported. Documented. Reviewed.
Any item that steals machine uptime is stealing money from your business.
Here are 7 steps you can take today to increase machine productivity in your shop:
- Record and investigate the causes of machine downtime in your shop.
- Record frequency – how many.
- Record severity– how long.
- Record by machine.
- Prepare a Pareto Analysis.
- Assign a cross functional team to investigate root causes.
- Implement corrective actions and review their effectiveness.
Solutions to system problems nearly always require a team approach. Have the team study the issues identified in the Pareto Analysis not just as specific delays, but as classes of delays. Then they can work on uncovering, and eliminating the organizational root cause of that class delay. In my experience, root causes are often institutional failings- inadequate training, inadequate maintenance, false economy on tooling, all of which are systemic problems requiring management attention.
“Quality is everybody’s responsibility,” I often heard when I was on a crew.
“The authority to permanently eliminate the root cause rests with management,” is what I muttered under my breath.
You are the Champion. The final arbiter.
Your team will identify the problems, find the root causes, and identify possible permanent solutions.
As champion your job is to help them “Make it so.”
Pareto Analysis , authored by Duncan Haugey, was found on the Project Smart website. http://www.projectsmart.co.uk/. Project Smart was launched in 2000 as a way to provide easy access to information about the project management profession.
