The manufacturing industry is booming, which is why starting a business in this industry can open more opportunities for growth and profit. But on the other side of the coin, the expansion of the manufacturing industry also attracted more entrepreneurs to start their own businesses, which means that you’ll have to compete with other established and emerging companies.
Improving your production line is a great way to stand out from the competition. With an improved production line, your business can consistently provide high-quality products, reduce waste, and lower your operating costs. These can become your ticket to earn more customers and attain long-term success in the ever-competitive manufacturing industry.
To help you get started, here’s how you can improve your production line:
1. Assess Your Existing Workflow
It’ll be challenging for any manufacturing business to improve its production line if they don’t have any idea how their existing production line operates. Should your business change every step on your production line? Or should you only improve certain areas?
As part of your attempt for improvement, make sure to start by assessing how effective your existing production line is. Ideally, you should assess these things during this first step:
- People: Do your employees have the right skills, and are these skills utilized in the right areas of the business? Have you employed a project manager who works by tracking the production line? Are your objectives clear, safe and realistic for your employees?
- Processes: When was the last time you implemented your processes? Can you determine which areas are the bottlenecks and pain points of your production line?
- Equipment and technology: Is your business using the best technology suitable to your needs? Is all of your equipment in good condition and maintained regularly? How frequently do you adapt to changes in production?
Assessing your existing workflow is vital because this allows your business to save resources as you can determine which areas or processes are still working and shouldn’t be altered. If it’s not broken, why fix it, right?
2. Update Technology And Processes
After assessing your existing workflow, start looking into areas or processes where technology should be updated or changed. Assessing the processes that have been followed by your employees in the production line is a good place to start.
The time and effort that your employees spend in learning new technologies and processes will reap benefits because these changes can reduce human error and increase production efficiency. New software solutions, such as Machine Learning Operations, for example, can also improve monitoring workflow. As discussed in this CNVRG article, MLOps can increase the collaboration and communication between different teams in your business.
When choosing which technology to use, don’t forget to consider the cost of ownership and how this technology will affect your production line. Paying for expensive software can be a cost-effective investment if it effectively solves a recurring problem on your production line, like reducing scrap or preventing production bottlenecks.
3. Prioritize Regular Maintenance
Regardless of how effective your equipment is, don’t expect that it can continue to run for years without any maintenance. Contrary to popular belief, you should commit to scheduled maintenance as this ensures that your equipment continues to be efficient and problems are detected and repaired in the soonest time possible.
For your business to commit to scheduled maintenance, educate all operators about the importance of equipment maintenance and teach them troubleshooting procedures. You should also schedule preventive maintenance at regular intervals.
When identifying when to schedule the maintenance of your equipment, consider your workflow processes and acquire information from the production floor. Ideally, you should schedule maintenance when the production floor isn’t too busy to lessen downtime and work stoppage.
4. Work With Your Employees
Implementing new processes and investing in new technologies will only provide benefits if your employees know how to adapt to all of these. This is also why you should regularly train and educate your employees about the changes you’ve implemented.
Aside from letting your employees undergo regular training on safety gear and safety training, you should hold training sessions whenever new equipment is installed. You should also offer other types of training that allow them to improve or attain new skills relevant to production.
When training and educating your employees, don’t limit their knowledge on equipment use and maintenance only. Your production line will work more smoothly if all of your employees understand policies on proper communication, workplace harassment, workplace health and safety, and employee disciplinary actions.
Remain Patient
Improving your production line requires time, so don’t expect to see results overnight. For your business to stand out from the competition with an improved production line, you should be ready to exert time and effort to implement strategies and audit which processes work and which ones don’t. This will allow you to determine and fix errors early.