Key Decisions in Manufacturing
A manufacturing floor in motion feels great. It feels like a job well done when we meet or exceed expectations on our hour-by-hour board. We’re having a good day when material seamlessly flows through the process and either out the door or into storage. A great day may offer us the opportunity to pull ahead, creating a little breathing room if tomorrow just doesn’t run as smoothly.
A busy, productive floor is a happy floor. And surely, we must maximize the machine time that we have, especially if we have people booked in to run it. If we lose the time, we lose capacity that we can never get back. It’s just gone—unless you are Superman, Hermione Granger, or Doctor Strange!
Raise your hand if you or members of your team view machine or associate idle time as unacceptable! Most of us, at one time or another, have been faced with decisions around continuing to produce even when we may not have needed that round of production in the near term. We view time lost in production as time and capacity we can never recover or a lost opportunity to serve the market.
Perhaps we have metrics that loom front and center like absorption or throughput—coupled with hour-by-hour targets that we’re trying to hit. Maybe we’ve built our capacity up only to find the market is a fickle force that shifts in needs, but we’re trying to reclaim that investment and show some return while we’re waiting on that demand to come back.
Who doesn’t love a good Field of Dreams moment? Total faith that if you build it, they will come. The belief that what you’ve produced will eventually be used or sold. After all, simply producing product does not achieve throughput. Throughput happens when we move product out into the market, and it is consumed by the customer. If we run that machine, we must believe that we’re going to move that product.
The notion of giving up hours or productive time on a machine, or the choice to not produce, is so counterintuitive. It is a bold, brave choice to decide to willingly give up run time. When you focus on the heartbeat of your factory and set the pace at which you are able to move product through the supply chain, you are making a decision that many would not make. But sometimes it is necessary to slow down in order to speed up.
When we make the decision to let time pass without production, we create a buffer in capacity, potential flexibility in the use of raw materials, reduce storage requirements, and free up working capital. This is a careful balance with the time that we cannot get back by taking a strategic pause in the schedule. When we think of how we define the demand plan, it includes our inventory plan for materials that are part of a make-to-stock program.
What do we do when faced with a gap in the need for production on that line?
- Maintenance and improvement activities
- Qualification, certification, or test runs
- Level load to relieve overcapacity situations
- Redeploy staff to other areas that need help
- Consider sitting idle to avoid unnecessary use of raw materials or waste of overproduction vs. plan
If you decide to strategically choose to let a machine sit idle rather than overproduce, your team will need help understanding the rationale. They will remember a time when there were service level issues related to products produced on that line, or they will look at their metrics set and believe that they will be seen as underperforming if they produce at a lesser rate or sit idle. As a leader, you will need to paint the picture of why, explain when, and discuss how it will work.
Idle time or a slower pace makes sense more often than most of us might prefer to acknowledge. Let SAP Capacity Evaluation help you understand options and opportunities to manage your way through a slower period for a particular line. What if that machine does sit idle? As counterintuitive as it may feel, sometimes idle time makes the most sense.
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