Reducing Waste and Increasing Quality on the Plant Floor

Waste is defined by Manufacturing Works as any activity that does not add value to a product or service. Common wastes in manufacturing include overproduction, system idle time, transportation, process time, inventory, underutilised resources, product defects, motion, and energy to name just a few. So how do you look at reducing the wastes in your business. 

One of the only ways to sustainably improving quality or reducing waste is to have a culture of efficiency built into your organisation.  But how do we best to create this? 

Ideally this business culture needs to be built from the roots up, as its the employees with the power to create real sustainable change within the organisation. They need to be self-motivated and care about the quality of the products being produced, as they are the driving force behind driving the standards in your organisation. If they believe in the culture of the business then your more likely to get successes. However if this is not supported by a top down approach it is bound to failure.   

The other important aspect is having quality control and assurance processes in place to aim towards zero defect production and increased efficiency. As well as kaizen, 6 sigma, continuous improvement initiatives, quality circles and benchmarking companies should not rest on their laurels, they should always be looking for ways to improve. 

Quality operations management for the plant floor is one way of doing this. This increases operational efficiency with improved accuracy of quality data and reduced cost of quality, offers higher operational agility while securing compliance and safety as well as reducing losses through tighter control and faster response times to deviations.  

For more information download our Quality Operations Management for the Plant Floor Webinar 

Reference: http://manufacturing-works.com/lean/eight_wastes.php

Helena Finnan,  Marketing Manager - Software, SolutionsPT