In the times when competitive advantage in many sectors is determined by details, enterprises constantly strive for new solutions that would allow to be better than business rivals.
One of the most important manners of increasing share in the market has for years been optimizing of production processes.
Let us explain when enterprises ought to use i and according to which principles the organization of production process ought to be implemented in the company.
When is it worth to facilitate the production process in the company?
Modern methods of optimizing the production process cover two areas the most frequently.
The first of them involves actions targeted at improving production efficiency, while the other one concerns lowering its costs.
While implementing certain adequate methods it is worth to consider whether significant limitations or faults of the accepted models are noticed.
The most frequently specified phenomena include:
– excessively high production costs,
– lack of possibility of using full resources,
– low degree of company competitiveness,
– issues related to systems,
– too long production process,
– too high complaints interest or faulty goods interest.
Occurrence of these or similar symptoms means most frequently the necessity to apply actions in the scope of optimizing production process.
By way of improving the situation of the company it may apply several methods and schemes of actions.
The most popular of them has been placed below.
Changing the form of organizing production on positions
In order to increase efficiency on the production lines it is worth to elaborate the norms constituting the order in the work place, economic order and ergonomic set of tools as well as standards that impact the employees on similar positions or ranks.
These assumptions stem from the Japanese method 5S which assumes that abiding by specific norms by the personnel will provide calculable benefits for the company – also financial ones.
Gradual improvement of the processes – Kaizen method
According to the Kaizen method, optimising production processes ought to occur by way of an evolution.
Whilst, implementing changes in many areas may bring opposite results to the assumed ones, therefore, individual improvements must be implemented gradually.
Thanks to such actions work becomes more ergonomic, production costs drop and the process of implementing changes engages all personnel.
Mapping of business processes
Creating schemes (maps) picturing production processes in the company allows persons responsible for producing good to assess efficiency of individual processes and produce them as a whole.
Thanks to this, identifying area that require intervention and implementation of optimizing solutions in company production becomes much easier.
Radical changes – the Kaikau method
Kaikaku is an opposite method to Kaizen and assumes introduction of almost immediate changes to the form of production organization.
Such a revolution normally concerns individual areas of work and not the functioning of an enterprise as a whole.
The goal of such radical reorganization of production is to increase efficiency of production in the shortest possible time.
Increasing production capacity thanks to SMED method
Single Minute Exchange of Die is a method which assumes that the production process in a company may be optimized through limiting the time necessary to present devices and the whole production lines.
In many companies such a downtime, caused by changeover of equipment, impacts a drop of production efficiency.
Obviously the point is not to limit these breaks and bring them down to one minute (normally this is not even possible), however, a benefit of this principle of organizing production process is elimination of financial losses stemming from the so called bottleneck.
Regardless of which method of production process optimizing we have selected it is worth to precede it with thorough research and analysis.