One of the primary goals of the many industrial facilities is increasing their production capacity. However, the main question that most managers and industrial investors ask is, “How do you increase the production of your facility?” Here are four strategic methods that you can use to improve production in your facility.
Evaluate Your Plant’s Internal Processes
The first process of enhancing the production capacity of your facility is evaluating it to determine what is performing well and what is not delivering the expected results.
The assessment will be able to identify the areas that can be improved to get better results. There are three ways of doing this:
- Ask the departmental heads to do reviews of their areas.
- Talk to employees to capture their suggestions on improving internal processes.
- Work with an external auditor for an unbiased evaluation of your system and recommendations for improvement.
Focus on Reducing Your Machine Downtime
One of the problems that pull down the production capacity of a plant with a huge margin is downtime. Extensive downtimes can easily raise the operating costs and, in some cases, make your plant run into losses.
Think of a situation where you have a lot of orders from clients, but breakdown forces you to halt operations for weeks. The effects are likely to be dire, including losses and the risk of losing clients to competitors.
To reduce downtime, you should ensure that your facility is maintained in top condition all the time. Consider adopting preventative maintenance, which allows you to anticipate issues and fix them on time to avoid downtime. An important part of preventative maintenance, as captured here, is plant automation that allows you to monitor the production process and fix issues early enough before they become serious problems.
Ask Your Employees to Work Overtime
When the demand for your products is high, one of the common methods of meeting it is asking your staff to work for more hours.
Often, this is a great method of enhancing the production of a manufacturing facility in the short-term, but it is not recommended in the long-term. Note that employees working overtime will need to be compensated appropriately for their work.
Although asking staff to work overtime can help to increase the productivity of your plant, the overall output per employee is likely to go down because they will be tired when working additional hours.
So, you should consider dividing your workforce into shifts so that every staff can reach his/her maximum output.
Analyze Suppliers’ Effectiveness
In some cases, the issues that limit production capacity might be in the purchasing management.
If you experience late shipment of raw materials or supplier sends the wrong materials, the production is likely to get delayed. In such cases, you should consider changing the supplier.
So, look for the supplier who is more effective and capable of making deliveries rapidly. If you use advanced strategies for lean production, such as Just In Time (JIT) model, timely delivery will be more crucial.
When running a manufacturing unit, the strategies you adopt are very crucial in determining the productivity of the facility. The strategies we have listed above can help you increase your plant’s productivity, setting the stage for higher profits.