When you are struggling to get orders out of the door and to your customers on time, you probably need to start looking at where you can improve your manufacturing output to get your targets well under control. Of course, there are a few areas you can look at first in order to speed things up, but you will also need to have a look at whether or not you are working with a realistic schedule in the first place.
Speed up manufacturing
It is not always possible to speed up manufacturing by just telling your workers to go faster. Usually, when this happens, you will find that your quality drops – which you’ll agree is not a good trade-off, especially in the pharmaceutical industry. However, there are other ways in which you can help your employees speed up without cutting corners on your business’s quality standards.
Sometimes, just cutting down on the number of times a product is handled, or the degree to which products are transported around your production site, can provide you with the means to increase manufacturing speed. If a product is constantly being picked up and put back down again by different members of staff, it may be wise to amalgamate a couple of stages in your manufacturing process, so that those stages can be completed at the same time. This will allow the product to stay in one person’s hands for longer, which will cut the manufacturing time down. It will reduce the wasted traveling time products need to go between workers for the individual stages to be completed.
Use machinery to help
Another way of reducing the manufacturing time for any one product is to install conveyor belts so that the product is traveling while others of its kind are still being worked on. This creates a continuous supply of products and work traveling around your factory floor, will help your workers and will cut down on the amount of wasted time caused by members of staff wandering around. There are many different types of conveyor belts available, and having one set up at your premises, designed especially for the work that you require it to do, can be easily accomplished if you go to a reputable business such as fluentconveyors.com.
Schedule workloads and improve procedures
The most important areas to look at when you want to save time and increase production rates are scheduling and procedures. If you have your procedures written down correctly, the next stage to look at is whether or not you have the times correct for each individual stage.
It is no secret that we all work at different speeds. We are all individuals, after all. Putting your fastest operators on tasks, then timing them will only give you false data when working out timings for scheduling purposes.
However, when it comes to actually setting up your employees’ schedules, having your fastest operators doing certain jobs is probably very wise, especially if they include a few stages in one, or have them at the start of a flow line in order to flood the line with work and get everyone working together, which is also a very good strategy.
