How To Improve Your Production And Help Your Business Function Properly

Phil Black - PII Editor 28/04/2021

477 4 minutes read

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Improving your business's production isn't an easy task and studies have shown that most organisations spend over 50% of their major resources — labor and equipment on it.

Using 250,000 hours of observation of businesses in various industry niches, the overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) is about 60%. This level of performance has a strong impact on labor which runs an average of 52% productivity. Significant improvements in production can be actualised through daily increments of small but important tasks. Ask technical questions of yourself each day as it relates to information, decision, and actions needed to be executed by your employees.

It’s not that your staff aren't functioning but the challenge they face is engaging in tasks that add little to no value to the organisation—searching for information, troubleshooting errors, and fighting fires.

Even though it's usually impossible to increase the business's productivity level to 100%, getting close to that, say 85-90%, would drastically improve the overall performance of the entire organisation.

The big question is how can you take your production level to the optimum for your business.

Here are ways to help you get started on that journey. Use them to get your business functioning properly again.

Understand and Analyse Your Business' Workflows

When you realise there's a need to improve your production, it's important to sit back and analyse how you've been operating. There would be no headway if you keep doing the same things and expect different results. This analysis can be done from three perspectives.

Employees: Do you have the right personnel with the necessary skill set working at the right place and at the right time? Do they have well-defined SMART objectives to work with? That means are your objectives specific, measurable, assignable, realistic, time-related?

Processes: Have you at any time mapped out and evaluated the production processes? If yes, then what were the challenges and obstacles you observed?

Equipment & Technology: You need to ensure your machinery and equipment are in working condition. Are the equipment and technology related to your business needs? Is it going to be easy for you to alter your production process?

Modernise And Automate Your Processes Where Your Necessary

After you’ve been able to map out the production workflows, you need to determine whether or not modernising your processes and technologies would improve your overall business. In most cases, it does. It might cost a bit more but helps it function properly.

Are there certain processes that can be automated? Getting and incorporating new software that improves planning, inventory control, or monitoring would go a long way in helping your business. You should also think about upgrading your current equipment and machinery.

If you are interested in upgrading or adopting modern technologies and equipment, carefully consider the total cost of ownership (TCO) and how it would affect your business.

Capitalise On Latest Manufacturing Tech Trends

One of the best methods of improving your production is to keep up and capitalise on the latest manufacturing technologies. Digital technologies are constantly growing and evolving, it’s important to be abreast to be able to compete with other businesses. Some technological trends that have become quite famous and useful currently popular are the Internet of Things (IoT), augmented reality, and machine learning. Understand how they can be applied to your business and get it to function properly.

Schedule Planned Maintenance

Lack of maintenance is a major reason why there are poorly performing production processes in your organisation. When maintenance is neglected for a long time, it has a terrible impact on your business because broken or old machinery is not only more expensive to fix. You might have to shut down production for a little while which would slow down business. In certain cases, the concept of material requirements planning is needed to estimate what materials are needed, schedule deliveries, and improve the overall performance of the business.

You can organise planned maintenance for your organisation by taking these measures into consideration:

Train your operators and technicians properly so they can effectively respond to any challenges that may arise.

Have a specific time and date at regular intervals where you can have scheduled maintenance.

Interact with your ground personnel to know the best period to set the scheduled maintenance. Considering they work more with the equipment, their input is valuable in this regard.

Don’t prolong scheduled maintenance for too long. You might end up creating more problems the longer you wait.

Workforce Planning

This planning type has you aligning the business’s objectives and requirements with those of your personnel. It primarily addresses issues such as the:

Scope: Are there available job openings in your organisation?

Skill Blend: Do you have the necessary blend of skills needed to keep your business running?

Costs: Is there a healthy balance in-between the cost of labor and your organisation’s needs?

Flexibility: Can the organisation's workforce blend to the ever-changing demands of the market?

Proper planning of your workforce makes the optimisation of operating costs easier, giving you huge control over your staff's output, identifying gaps in skills, and helping in the establishment of the necessary training and education symposiums.

Get Rid of Unused Machinery

In improving productivity, it is important that you don't leave machinery you no longer have use for around. That can slow down your workflow and overall output. Apart from that, it creates clutter and causes you to spend money on maintenance that could have been used for something else and that's not profitable. That’s something you want to avoid if you want to improve production and boost productivity.

A concept you'd do well to consider, apart from getting rid of unused equipment, is loaning and renting of equipment. It's important to understand them and the differences, so you can know how it would benefit you such that you don't get stuck with old machinery.

Improving your company's production and business efficiency is an ongoing process. There's untapped value in making little changes in the production process. That's why the points in this article are curated accordingly.

In certain scenarios, making the most minute but strategic change in operations is what produces the biggest results. On that note, if you want your production process to improve quickly, then create a standard operational procedure and ensure it's strictly followed.