You’re in a tough spot – you have to have increase output, improve productivity, de-bottleneck or reduce production costs in your manufacturing / processing plant. Where do you start ?
We have 5 MECHVAC Do’s and Don’ts for you to consider.
Please Don’t start here
- Immediately buy new equipment to increase capacity. The silver bullet solution rarely delivers.
- Increase material and work in progress storage to overcome scheduling problems and plant downtime. Would you eat a lot more and stop exercise to improve your health ?
- Design and build your own fully automated solution. White elephants apply here.
- Let Maintenance design the new process. It will be great for them but not for anybody else.
- Ignore your own production employee’s ideas. They have used the old process for so long they will know what’s wrong and what should be better.
Doing any of the above will be costly and high risk.
So Do start here instead
- Establish a productivity improvement team in house with clear goals
- Appoint a facilitator to lead the team
- Process map the value stream under consideration
- Conduct a process waste minimisation analysis
- Redesign the process flow and design a new plant layout
Yes, its Lean Manufacturing 101 and it takes time, leadership and planning. But it will provide the most cost effective and efficient solution.
At MECHVAC we have many years experience in providing lean solutions to our customers problems. If you don’t have the in-house capability please feel free to contact us to discuss your project.
