When fixing a downtime issue, make one change at a time.

Often, multiple changes are made at the same time, without individually checking their impact on the equipment. This makes it much harder to diagnose problems and evaluate the effectiveness of solutions.

When fixing a downtime issue, make one change at a time.

Often, multiple changes are made at the same time, without individually checking their impact on the equipment. This makes it much harder to diagnose problems and evaluate the effectiveness of solutions.

It is essential to capture a reason and duration for each downtime incident to enable the team to effectively prioritize and focus.

Start simple, and make sure every reason is clear (when compared with other reasons) and describes symptoms (as opposed to attempting to diagnose root causes). Remove reasons that aren’t regularly used and add reasons.

It is essential to capture a reason and duration for each downtime incident to enable the team to effectively prioritize and focus.

Start simple, and make sure every reason is clear (when compared with other reasons) and describes symptoms (as opposed to attempting to diagnose root causes). Remove reasons that aren’t regularly used and add reasons.

From a recent article published by M4B Marketing:

When analyzing your sales performance consider the following: 

• Pricing changes eg. price increases or discounting
• Competitors – competitors entering or exiting the market
• New product or service launch growing sales
• New product or service cannibalizing existing product or service sales
• Customers moving between products or services
• Changes in customer demand eg. increasing or decreasing
• The segments and distribution channels you operate in

When Hoffmaster finally flipped the switch on its ERP migration at the end of February, the IT director was nervous. Not only was the paper-goods supplier consolidating a manufacturing site on Infor ERP LX, but it was also replacing an old shop floor reporting system with a new one from Crossroads RMC. There was a lot that could go wrong for the IBM i shop.

"When we weighed all of our products, Crossroads RMC pretty much convinced us their product was plug and play and their integration back to LX was solid as a rock, and they were right..." the IT director says.

Click Here to Learn about Hoffmaster’s move to Infor LX and their implementation of the Crossroads MES solution.

Two big sources of inefficiencies in manufacturing are paper and spreadsheets. I know that you love ‘em, but they are the cause of more problems than you probably realize. Think of how long it takes you to get paper-based data into the hands of those who can do something valuable with the data.
 

• Is the information captured correctly?
• Can everyone access the information?
• Is this an accurate representation of what’s going on across all operations?

Make your shop floor paperless and put systems in place that talk to one another and automatically pull and push data to and from your ERP so that you can look in one place for all the information you need to run your business effectively.