Production managers must strive to increase productivity. In doing so, our efforts must be targeted on the following:
• Information: Capture operations data and pinpoint the losses.
• Focus: Identify where to concentrate our efforts on.
• Action: Take logical, appropriate, timely and consistent action.
These three are the building blocks of improving productivity.
Information
We must capture the production loss and its reasons at various points in the production process.
• Schedule Loss: Loss arising out of idle time or no schedule being available for the machine. In this situation, the machine is available and ready but not being used.
• Availability Loss: Due to all events that stop production for an appreciable amount of time (usually several minutes).
E.g.: Equipment failures, unplanned maintenance, material shortages and changeovers.
• Performance Loss: Includes all factors that cause the process to operate at less than the maximum possible speed while running (including both slow cycles and small stops),
e.g.: machine wear, jams, substandard or wrong materials and operating errors.
• Quality Loss: Includes productivity lost from manufacturing parts that do not meet the quality standards. These are rejection due to unacceptable quality found after every production process.
Focus
• After the above information is available and classified, we must select which loss we will focus to improve upon, i.e. which loss we will try to reduce first.
• We may decide this focus on the basis of our priority or on what is possible for us. Ideally, we must focus to improve upon higher to lower loss, i.e. Schedule loss, availability loss, performance loss or quality loss, because focusing improvement efforts on a loss which has higher impact, yields better improvement in productivity.
Action
As per the focus decided, we must decide the action items to start the improvement exercise. These actions must be logical. They must be decided upon thoughtfully and they must be consistent.
WHAT YOU CAN READ NEXT
PREVIOUS POST:
Managing 6M’s of Production
