5 Places to Look for Quick Efficiency Gains

Written by Doug Hanawalt, Lead Productivity Improvement Specialist

In today's dynamic and sometimes challenging economic environment, I’ve found that many of our manufacturing clients are examining their operational processes and looking for ways to boost efficiency and streamline their workflows. Working with them, I keep returning to these five key target areas to find operational efficiency.

1. Eliminate Waste: One of the best ways to discover efficiency gains in a manufacturing process is to eliminate waste. Whether you refer to them as the 7 or 8 wastes, you should learn to constantly be on the lookout and recognize them, and become skilled at eliminating them. It is always the simplest route to say work twice as hard or twice as fast, but it is usually not achievable for any length of time. The best long-term solution is to work smarter by eliminating the waste in your processes.
2. Create Clean and Organized Workspaces: An additional place to achieve gains in the workplace is to recognize 5S inefficiencies and correct them. Many teams downplay the importance of 5S as simply a housekeeping exercise. It is truly the epitome of organization in the workplace and is a serious timesaver. The output is a clean, organized, orderly, and safe workplace. 5S improvements are also one of the best methods to gain new or additional business for the organization.
3. Complete an Organizational Value Stream Map: Waste is sometimes difficult to expose at the organizational level. When a complete value stream map is reviewed at the organizational level, which includes all operations of a manufacturing process, the waste becomes obvious. Independent functions do not realize that they are waiting for previous steps or that they are holding up downstream steps of the process. VSM allows the organization to compare everyone’s timing and determine which steps are waiting and how much, then those wastes can be eliminated.
4. Reduce Changeover Time: Any time saved by simply reducing the time a changeover takes or ideally eliminating changeovers altogether can provide additional free manufacturing time for the organization. Obtaining a balance between changeover and inventory costs will lead to the most effective and efficient manufacturing process.
5. Improve Equipment Maintenance: Unnecessary downtime can ruin an organization’s improvement efforts when compared to all the other gains mentioned in this article. Similar to set up reduction, Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) efficiency gains provide free additional manufacturing time in an organization. TPM is not a specific policy but more of a culture and philosophy with a new attitude towards maintenance.

If any of these types of gains hit home with you and your organization, feel free to reach out to Purdue MEP at mepsupport@purdue.edu for more information, and let us help to make your manufacturing operations more effective and efficient.

Writer: Doug Hanawalt, 317-275-6810, dhanawa@purdue.edu