Our Guide to Increasing Efficiency & Productivity

Enhancing productivity is essential to boosting profits and maintaining competitiveness. Increasing efficiency on the manufacturing floor starts with analyzing facility layout, employees and processes. With that said, this article highlights five ways to reduce downtime and increase output.

Improve Operations

• Evaluate your production line. Is your labor cost at what it should be or is it too high?
• Maintain a consistent workflow to ensure peak efficiency even during the busiest hours.
• Organize the workspace by removing unneeded or unused tools and materials from the workspace.
• Consider value stream mapping to better understand pain points and record what changes could impact the overall system.

Optimize your team

• Have your best workers train the rookies.
• Weed out less productive employees and incentivize the harder working ones, i.e. greater responsibility, more hours, bonuses for exceeding quotas.
• Cross train employees for multiple jobs.
• Invest in continued employee education.

Keep proper and regular maintenance records

• The logs must stay up to date to ensure accuracy.
• Up to date maintenance records will help your case when you approach the manufacturer.
• Keep spare parts on hand as lead times can vary and be detrimental when the production line is down.
• Use information from the floor and your workflow processes to figure out  the best time to shut down for maintenance

Seek machinery operators for their input

• Use your team and their experience to continuously evolve and improve processes.
• Ask them how their day to day tasks and have them explain ways in which they could improve.
• Encourage collaboration and teamwork.

Set clear safety expectations

• Consider using CEMA safety training videos annually and for new hires
• Keep walkways and vehicle routes clear of trash and/or excess merchandise.
• Use proper signage and safety labeling.
• Implement safe routes and traffic lanes with floor tape.

In conclusion, increased productivity will result in greater total value and sellable assets for your company.  This opens doors to expand business, increase wages or update equipment. It is important to prioritize and figure out what is most important at the moment to start taking steps to improve your facility.

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