Manufacturing Challenges 3# - Making More for Less

Cost containment pressures are increasingly driving the Manufacturing sector. Our customers have seen an increased focus on maximising their output without affecting quality. This is a common theme that is seen across all industries. Additionally, manufacturing processes have become more complex and companies often use many disparate systems in their production operations, with standard operating procedures (SOP's) often being recorded in paper based format. 

Where SOP’s are not followed, it can lead to loss in throughput and affect productivity, despite, in many cases, the company having invested heavily in automating their production lines and processes. If allowed to go unchecked, this leads to a further lack of communications between the key stakeholders, leading to decreased productivity. As an example, a Scheduler puts together a plan based on the current work orders, and this is reflected in the inventory levels. The plan is based on the most efficient route to fulfill the work orders, but the Scheduler doesn't have full visibility of the Maintenance Engineer’s challenges, e.g. where an intermittent fault on a variable speed drive is causing quality issues. Production  thus has a problem as they have to follow the plan, which according to them would be unrealistic, and to add to these problems, Quality Control hasn't been informed regarding these issues. Often, organisations introduce more and more paper based SOP’s to counter such issues. From our experience, these add further layers of complexity to the system without addressing the core issue, and thus the business needs go unresolved. 

Having successfully engaged with a number of customers in these situations, SolutionsPT have the knowledge and experience in implementing solutions which provide full visualisation of the workflow, at all levels, while concurrently keeping all the key stakeholders informed and up to date automatically, and ensuring that there is a means to automate and check SOP’s every step of the way. This leads to increased communication between departments, and increased collaboration between the people and systems, allowing businesses to reduce inventory through better management of their processes, thereby leading to increased productivity and making more from less.

Let's think about the following (better) scenario: 

During a production shift, in the event of a failure on a variable speed drive (for example), would it help if the Line Operator is given step by step instructions to follow, while concurrently, the Production Manager is made aware of this alarm and is able to electronically revise the maintenance schedule, the Scheduler is made aware of this, and submits a revised work order and Line Change instructions to the Line Operator and Quality, and the Maintenance Engineer is made aware of the drive failure and reacts to it, with all these notifications being sent out concurrently, automatically and in real time?