Standard costing is really a ‘best guess’ at labor costing -- these numbers are often inaccurate, incomplete or out of date.

Accurate job costing requires the capture of all tasks associated with a specific product or job, including direct and indirect labor in setup, production, and customer service.

Inaccuracies in the collection of time allocated to machinery and the use of materials can result in the inability to properly pass those charges through to the customer, reducing company profitability.

Basically, you can’t manage what you can’t measure -- and you can’t measure what you can’t track. So the inability to track time-to task ultimately inhibits maximum utilization of the workforce. Unproductive activities remain hidden from sight -- managers don’t have the information needed to understand where wasted time exists, and therefore cannot create an action plan to remove it.

Optimize Your Manufacturing Today!

• Sit down with your IT team. Decide how the information will be captured and where it will be stored so that employees have access to it. What software tools need to be used to capture the information? How does it need to be organized? Create a repeatable process to make this easy for your staff.
   
• Interview the person. Have them talk you through his/her job. What are the things they do every day? What are their biggest challenges? How do they overcome them? 
   
• Have someone shadow the person for a week. Watch what they do and how they do it. Ask questions. Who does he/she interact with in their department? Outside of their department? Why?
   
• Find out what tools he/she uses to perform their job? Are there spreadsheets?  Reports within your ERP / outside of your ERP? Separate stand-alone databases? Drawings? Websites? Why does he/she use them?
   
• Video record how the person does their job. Is their technique critical to “doing it right” the first time and not ending up with a bunch of scrap that you can’t reuse?
   
• Figure out if the person does anything special on a monthly, quarterly, or annual basis that might not come up during the observation period or interview. 
   
• Map how he/she uses your business system and how that impacts the rest of the company. Understand both the “what” and the “why”. Without this, new employees may end up figuring out what they need to do, but never understand why they need to do it.

Optimize Your Manufacturing Today!

• Are you tracking downtime? Is it done manually, or with some type of automation or application that gathers information in real-time, or is it based upon history?
• If you are measuring team effectiveness by shift, you know there are significant differences between them. Have you figured out why?

One of our automotive customers was experiencing significant inefficiencies and difficulties with their receiving operations. After analyzing their operation, we discovered a disconnect between how they were tracking their incoming goods and what their ERP system thought was on hand.

This disconnect created time-consuming steps to process incoming material and determine where the material was needed. The manual process slowed production, caused additional staffing needs and hindered their ability to effectively get needed material to the assembly line. They chose to implement our data collection solution to automate the process.

Since implementing the solution, receiving and moving material was quicker, more accurate and efficient. This enabled the addition of another assembly line, increasing production volume – without adding staff.

Optimize Your Manufacturing Today!

I’m not talking “Modus Operandi,” which is a fancy way to say: “what’s your plan to get stuff done”.  I’m talking about Manufacturing Optimization. 

It is all about efficiency, and by that I mean doing more with less. Less labor, less time, less materials, while still delivering a high quality product on time.

The Three Secrets to Improving your MO

1. Identify the key metrics
You need benchmark data so you know what realistic goals are, then track them and publish your performance along with a brief comment from time to time on how things are trending and how you compare with others, particularly your primary competitors. The best thing about this is that it is a system that develops a life of its own.

2. Measure it
Automatically, people start to think about improving things. Then the fun part, stuff begins to improve by itself. Once in place, the system just hums along and the benefits appear, because it has motivated people to think about it, and figure out what they can do to make it better.

3. Communicate it
So if you publish gross profit numbers, explain to people how what they do affects the numbers. Employees tend to start to modify their behavior as a result, and look more critically at whether a given purchase is even necessary.

Scrap and rework costs are a manufacturing reality impacting organizations across all industries and product lines.

Scrap and rework costs are caused by many things—when the wrong parts are ordered, when engineering changes aren’t effectively communicated or when designs aren’t properly executed on the manufacturing line.

No matter why scrap and rework occurs, its impact on an organization is always the same—wasted time and money. And while no one, especially an operations manager, wants to admit it, these expenses add up quickly and negatively impact the bottom line...

Common sense rules. We may not like them, but generally, they stand the test of time and should be followed. Here are 8 common sense rules related to inventory management published by Inbound Logistics back in 2007. They still hold true today. 

1. If you don' t know where you are going, no road will take you there. Enterprise resource management systems are designed to tell you about today' s inventory. With some work, you can also access information about past inventory. To manage inventory proactively, however, you must know projected inventory levels for the future.

2. Make what you can sell. An integrated Sales and Operations Plan will naturally take into account expected demand in its production plan. Inventory is not an independent variable - it is the direct result of demand and supply.

3. Sell what you can make. Too often, a disconnect exists between sales and marketing desires and the reality of production capabilities.

4. If you can' t sell it, stop making it. If demand for your product does not materialize, you need to identify that gap quickly to avoid a buildup of non-moving inventory. Numerous mechanisms can be put in place to identify such trends.

For tips 5 through 8 and more details into the other tips, click the button below to read the full article.

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.