Improving Operational Efficiency: Part 4

Labor Resource Planning

Every organization is constrained by the resources available to them. Utilizing those resources effectively is a key to success. 

Manufacturing is constrained by labor, raw material availability and equipment scheduling. The ability to optimize any one of these can make a big difference in helping your company’s bottom line. Labor is often overlooked in the planning process but a key element.

Gaining insight into how much labor is needed to complete a job, enables your scheduler to match labor resources to production requirements efficiently. 

  

Key questions to monitoring labor include: 

• Do have enough people to complete a job in a timely manner? 
• What adjustments need to be made to avoid unnecessary overhead?
• Can I extend, delay or consolidate work to avoid overtime?
• Do I have any upcoming bottlenecks? Can I move jobs from high volume days to level the workload and avoid a conflict that could strain limited resources?
• Can I reduce the cost of Training new workers?
• Can I reduce the complications caused by over staffing a project, such as excessive layers of communication?

Vicinity helps process manufacturers get the most out of their labor resources.  Vicinity records labor standards by formula. By setting a standard requirement Vicinity can calculate how many labor hours will be needed to execute the schedule and identify resource bottlenecks. This allows the scheduler to match the labor force to meet production demand reducing surges and lulls in production time. Bringing the labor requirements into the scheduling process will save your scheduler time and your company money with a very quick return.

Improving Operational Efficiency: Part 2

Scheduling by Formula

A common challenge for process manufacturers is production scheduling. If only the production schedule could group products that use the same formula, manufacturers would gain efficiencies by creating longer runs.

In batch manufacturing multiple finished products can be made from the same formula. A scheduler may make cookies that go in a 50 cookie tin verses a box of 100 cookies.  Both products share the same formula but each have different packaging. The scheduler may have a requirement for tins this week and drums the following week.

What’s a scheduler to do?

When a scheduler has visibility into finished good demand and can view the demand by common formula the scheduler is able to create larger batches by combining demand for multiple container sizes. Creating a larger batch size by scheduling production by formula can increase operational efficiency. Scheduling by formula allows the production team to minimize clean ups and downtime. And machine downtime equals lower operational productivity.

See the Vicinity planning workbench in action.

What Vicinity brings to the table is the ability to see demand out into the future with forecasting and planning tools. Vicinity software gives users the ability to group the production schedule by formula allowing the scheduler the ability to view the production schedule over time so that like items may be grouped together. Many items can be produced from the same batch ticket or production run, if they share the same formula. The result is improved production efficiency and profits.

Scheduling by Formula – Why Bother?

I was at a client the other day and heard an interesting discussion.
The production scheduler was discussing an issue with the production manager about how the scheduler was scheduling production. The production manager was making the case that the scheduler was killing the production efficiency by changing products as often as he was. Production would like to run long runs of the same formula to avoid costly changeovers. Instead he was contending that the scheduler was requesting partial batches and forcing more clean ups than needed.
The scheduler was arguing that he was changing products to keep inventories low. His position was that low inventories was in the best interest of the company and the only way to accomplish that was to run short runs and for only the quantity needed.
So who was right?
My two cents is that a company needs to balance the needs of the customer (on time product often achieved by holding FG inventory) and reduction of working capital (keeping inventories as low as possible). But how can you do that in a formula based manufacturing facility?
The easiest way to achieve this balance is to look for opportunities to produce finished goods that share the same formula. In some facilities producing bulk formula is a possibility and then fill to order. From this bulk multiple finished goods can be produced off of the same blending/mixing batch of a formula. The result is to reduce the number of mixes of the formula which reduces the number of times a change over occurs in blending.
In other facilities multiple finished goods can be filled directly from the mixing tank without much bottling like changes.
It is important for a formula manufacturer's scheduling tool to be able to combine finished good SKU's by formula and then by filling line. This allows a scheduler to better see the opportunities to run like products at the same time. Thank goodness for me the application they are implementing (Vicinity) has this capability out of the box. This is not characteristic of products designed for assembly or discrete manufacturing.
So how did this end?
The scheduler looked out into the future at sales orders and forecasts and allowed the production manager to make some product that would be needed in upcoming weeks. At the same time the production manager grouped the formulas in a specific sequence to reduce his change over time.
Both came to me and asked that we move up the implementation of Vicinity scheduling. Not a bad day for me that is certain.