Manufacturing productivity tool belt

Manufacturing Productivity Toolbelt
Classic and Modern, Public Domain and Proprietary

Use this checklist to review your own manufacturing operations, and lead to the more significant opportunities to improve productivity, to cut cost and add output.

A. Is operating strategy correct for today’s economy?
Pareto analysis of product standard cost
Pareto; ABC understanding of costs and problems enterprise-wide
Product pruning, lop off the non-profitable products
Dedicated / flexible operators? One product or many
Dedicated or flexible process? One product or many
Integration of facilities; synergies possible from combination; equipment, floor space; capacity; longer runs; management, scheduling, purchasing, overhead leverage, distribution patterns and methods;
Man operations for 1) low cost or 2) high output? They will not yield the same direct labor cost, nor output, nor overall productivity nor cost especially relating to absorption.
New product introduction practice; discipline re get it right before produce
Make versus buy analysis, vertical integration offers promise?

B. Standardize and document the processes
Bill of materials; CAD-CAM; standard operator methods for repeatability; operating procedures; machine settings; router; training manuals; quality standards, inspection criteria, limit samples.

C. Choose materials planning and scheduling tools
Carefully choose from JIT / Kan Ban / Continuous Work Flow; batch; EOQ. Recognize that MRP and JIT are mutually exclusive
Cycle times and batch sizes to meet customer demands and timing, tied into
inventory and scheduling system. Something as simple as two bin inventory?

D. How will you control materials?
Actual control or virtual / electronic; inventory accuracy; coding of location; kit issue
Visible stock, Visible record. In line WIP or set aside.
Good cube utilization; racks, aisles, heights, density,

E. Define factory overhead accurately
If overhead costs are not accurately defined and allocated, the published standard cost is meaningless at best; at worst it is harmful because it leads to wrong decisions. Correct decisions can only be supported by correct information.

Basic Actions: Identify and define the major overhead contributors, assign them to the product cost. Subsequently, eliminate or reduce the cost, and measure what remains appropriately. Make judgments based on the newly developed product cost.

F. Do you intend to use a formal engagement of people?
Quality Circles, Team Building, Suggestion Systems, Work Simplification, Value Analysis, profit sharing, AESOP,

G. Set quality performance measurement, performance enhancements and / or as the overall quality system.
Statistical Quality Control (Deming), Zero Defects (Phil Crosby), Quality Circles, Six Sigma, Dr. Juran, Total Quality Management or TQM, Malcolm Baldridge Award, ISO 9000 et al, Design of Experiments (Taguchi), Quality Function Deployment (QFD)

H. Optimize equipment and process steps
1) Constraints management is perhaps the most important tool to use on the shop floor, and it usually is pretty inexpensive to correct problems quickly. Identify production constraints, manage them, and staff all other tasks according to the constrained output level. Then in order, raise the constraints. Balance lines to the constraint.

2) Consolidate and integrate product to generate the most profitable product mix.

3). Minimize the number of changes. Keep equipment up through rapid changeover, Single Minute Change of Die; utilize maintenance manuals, preventive maintenance, equipment history, replacement parts stocked, a sense of urgency at breakdown maintenance.

4) Schedule purchases and production to meet sales demands. Don’t start product until all parts are on hand and accepted; if parts are late penalize the guilty party and not manufacturing.

5) Set acceptability of components and product compared to customer needs, adapt specs accordingly.

6) Create ergonomic workplaces to ease job stress and injuries.

7) Measure work for labor and cost standards but also to set crew sizes, to define capacity, to schedule lines, line balance, equipment justification, variance analysis.

8) Performance reporting of: Actual versus standard cost; Absorption of overhead, Schedule, cycle time, backorder; Quality, scrap, rework cost, Cost of Quality;
Direct labor, indirect labor, utilization / capacity / constraints; changeover time; downtime reports; scheduling constraints; efficiency, productivity. New product introduction cycle.

9) Apply real-time work assignment (RTWA). Give out one job, agree with the person when it will be done (usually a few hours), have the person give it back to you on time, when you assign the next job. RTWA looks like and probably is micromanagement, but it is often useful to gain a quick control of a problem area, especially maintenance, warehouse, and other functions with job-order characteristics. Both leader and employee will get positive reinforcement from each task completed, and both will be sure that each task is correctly done as a solid base for the next step.

10) Utilize surplus people; Identify and separate them physically. Use for a labor pool to fill absentee, fill open jobs, relieve at break / lunch, train in concepts such as Lean, add a production shift, man for capacity rather than efficiency especially on bottleneck equipment, overlooked functions such as preventive maintenance, avoid buying equipment just for labor productivity reasons, fill in for people being trained / cross trained, perform contracted functions, add features to products, community service

Lean says take the best people and train in lean; school, visits, local projects. 3 to six months, rotate back to floor. In meantime fill floor turnover with these but do not replace turnover in surplus.

Jack Greene, Jackson Productivity Research Inc.


Manufacturing productivity tool belt - To learn more about this author, visit Jack Greene's Website.

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