Manufacturing is relentlessly competitive–every second and every cent counts. Continuous manufacturing process improvement is a principle and methodology of constantly seeking opportunities for ongoing, incremental improvements to processes, services, and products.
It’s also a cultural mindset that, when adopted, helps businesses fuel innovation and turn challenges into growth opportunities. Its central belief is that even the smallest adjustments can lead a manufacturer to significant results over time. This also helps encourage every member of your team, no matter their role, to engage in process improvement and embrace the idea that every improvement matters, no matter how tiny.
Ultimately, it helps your company minimize waste and maximize efficiency, quality, and production capacity–which helps make your business more resilient and able to withstand, and even edge out, competition. It also better enables you to pivot during disruptive events, and adapt your operations as customer preferences evolve.
To work though, you need a clear, black-and-white picture of what your issues are, and metrics that help you prioritize action and leverage data into improvements. Without that data, what commonly happens is disagreements and competing hypotheses, which too often results in inaction.
Pairing continuous process improvement with production monitoring, however, gives you the insights you need to systematically adjust. The real-time data you get helps you assess where you’re losing efficiency, and what adjustments and metric goals to prioritize.
No matter what type of manufacturing processes you run, you can start adopting continuous improvement at any time, but before you begin, you need a plan and some clear goals. It’s critical to understand what information is important across your organization–both for your shop floor and for leadership–and why it matters. There are key steps to take to set you in the right direction, and key KPIs to establish from the outset.
The Benefits of Continuous Manufacturing Process Improvement + Production Monitoring from a Leadership Perspective
From a leadership perspective, pairing continuous process improvement with production monitoring delivers clear benefits.
Quantifiable and continuous ROI:
If your organization is too reliant on manually tracking production, you’re likely dealing with unreliable, inconsistent, and untimely information. One of the powerful benefits of adding production monitoring is its ability to continuously track and evaluate real data–in real-time–for clear, measurable gains.
When paired with the ability to trend this data over time, company leadership uncovers insights on what’s impacting the bottom line. Not only does this objectively help prioritize opportunities for improvement, but it gives leadership the ability to quantify ROI as your organization implements these improvements, no matter how large or small.
Reduces waste:
As mentioned, without data, it's difficult for organizations to pinpoint the root causes of inefficiencies. Teams, while knowledgeable, make hypotheses that can’t easily be tested or measured, leading to indecision that ultimately prevents the company from making any changes–keeping you stuck in the status quo.
Production monitoring, however, gives leadership a clear picture of precisely where waste is happening, making it far simpler to build a case for making changes such as investing in new equipment, training or employees.
“I can now quantify our losses related to product falling on the floor, demonstrate potential savings if we invest in new equipment and quickly answer questions about labor, the profitability of investments, etc. My arguments are supported with data.” Ould Boudjema, Director of Production and Maintenance, Putter’s Pickles
The continuous process improvement methodology fosters a manufacturing environment that encourages a rigorous examination of operations to identify redundancies and inefficiencies. When you combine this with the ability to track and measure waste, it’s far more impactful. Employees can be more easily engaged, as they can see how their efforts are making a positive change and work together to help create a more cost-effective operation.
Improve quality and increase customer satisfaction:
When you encourage an environment and culture dedicated to continuously improving processes and products, you will naturally see the quality of what you’re producing rise–leading to higher levels of customer satisfaction. This also encourages ideas and feedback from employees at all levels, leading to a sense of ownership, a culture of excellence, and ideas to address immediate customer needs and anticipate future demand.
For company leadership, combining production KPIs with sales and marketing KPIs, from revenue to metrics like repeat buyers and net promoters, can help deliver the entire organization a picture of how their efforts for improvement are helping create satisfied and loyal customers.
Key KPIs to Prioritize:
While nearly every metric tracked through production monitoring can ultimately be translated into cost and impact margins, some stand out as most relevant to the C-suite:
- Waste
- Yield
- Cost per Unit
The Benefits from the Shop Floor Perspective
On the shop floor, you’re constantly trying to thread the needle of efficiency, while taking care not to overburden your people or your equipment. Just as for the leadership team, adding production monitoring technology enables you to quit the guessing game. Data enables you to uncover hidden inefficiencies and identify high-impact projects to prioritize. By identifying opportunities to streamline operations, you can realistically reduce costs by increasing throughput without adding labor or stretching teams or equipment too far.
- Meet production targets: Elevating production capacity takes discipline and attention. Combining continuous process improvement with data insights from production monitoring software enables shop floors to track production targets continuously, and pinpoint where you need to focus your teams when you’re not on track or hitting targets.
- Deliver on time: Knowing where inefficiencies are really happening, and why, and having the ability to track related KPIs gives you and your team concrete numbers to work from and towards. Real-time data also enables you to catch delays and issues earlier, enabling timely corrections so you’re able to stay on track to deliver on time. It also gives you a clear picture of what timelines are possible (and aren’t), so you can more effectively manage across the floor and plan labor more accurately.
- Engage your teams: Again, when employees know that every little thing they do matters–and that even the smallest improvement adds up in the process of continuous improvement–they feel more engaged with their work, leading to not only higher job satisfaction but also a culture of excellence, with real gains in product quality and productivity.
“Production monitoring software helps labor-reliant companies such as ours to correlate staffing requirements with product runs and production targets. We’ve been able to reduce costs by increasing throughput without adding labor. Now we can plan more accurately by asking: Do we have too many people scheduled, or do we need to bring in more?” Danny Sedra, VP of Operations, Central Bernard
Key KPIs to Prioritize
For shop floors, it’s performance, performance, performance. Again, it’s possible to track many different metrics but some are more critical to prioritize, with variances depending on the type of manufacturing process you’re running.
- Performance
- Rates or Production Speed of Products
- Downtime
- Changeover Time
- Set-up Time
- Lead Time
- Cycle Time
- On-Time Delivery
- Production Schedule Attainment
- Takt Time
Where to Get Started with Continuous Manufacturing Process Improvement:
- Identify the business case: To know where you’re going, you must know where you’re starting from. While continuous manufacturing process improvement is indeed a culture that should impact your entire business, it helps to have a starting point. Make an honest evaluation of your current state, including the team culture, production processes, and resources. Now, where do you want to head? What’s needed most? What are your top goals and priorities? What resources will you need to add to achieve them?
- Identify KPIs: Because it is possible to track so much data, it’s also possible to (easily) get distracted and overwhelmed. KPIs keep you honest and accountable to the priorities and goals you’ve set–while ensuring you’re measuring outcomes that enable you to either validate your plan and efforts, or find another solution. As you measure, you can use your KPIs to optimize and provide feedback to employees, helping to keep them engaged in the efforts.
- Determine processes and accountability chain: Who owns which process and component at each level? Managers and employees should both know exactly who is accountable, and how each piece impacts the business and/or project as a whole. You should also use checklists and other tools to ensure progress is tracked at each level: job, machine, department, and factory.
- Tap technology and implement the right tools: Whether you use Lean or Six Sigma methodologies, there are a variety of different tools, charts, diagrams, and analysis methods you can lean on to help employees identify and analyze issues and inefficiencies. If you don’t already have production monitoring software, now is the time to implement it so you can start measuring performance from the outset. For every tool you roll out, ensure that each employee using it is trained properly, so they know how to maximize its efficacy.
- Embrace a growth/learning mindset: To encourage an environment of continuous improvement, employees can’t be afraid to voice their ideas or observations. Encourage an open dialogue of ideas and feedback that flows in every direction. Even if an idea doesn’t end up moving forward, company leaders should emphasize that the process of improvement means a process of learning. This includes what’s working as much as it does what’s not. Leaders and managers should also lead employees in celebrating their wins, even small ones, and learnings, to help enforce the idea that learning from either kind of experience leads to better decision-making, improvements, and innovations.
- Work the Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) cycle: The Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDA) cycle is “a problem-solving iterative method for improving processes and products continuously.” As you embrace a continuous improvement mindset, this cycle helps you engage with it throughout your day. At its core, it comes down to planning your tasks and objectives, doing the work while keeping the business goals in mind, checking outcomes when the work is complete, and reflecting on whether or not objectives were met, what you learned, and how you can adjust or improve your process for the next time.
Key Takeaways
Production monitoring technology paired with continuous process improvement work so well together because of this: the software helps you access clear, valuable insights from your real-time data, while continuous process improvement helps you leverage that data into action, change, and results.
After all, you can gather all the data you want, but if you don’t do anything with it, you won’t see any improvements.
Alternatively, if you’re trying to adopt continuous process improvement without the data, you may encounter a lot of disagreement amongst team members about what your problems are and what the root cause of them is.
You’ll see the most success when you use the data to see what’s going on in your processes and production, identify the issues and opportunities, use key KPIs to set goals and prioritize improvements and projects, and engage your team in the concept of continuous process improvement.
