Avoid Manufacturing More Costs Than You Already Have
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40 percent less than the price of new equipment. Of course, this value can vary considerably depending on factors such as the age of the equipment, the hours of use accumulated, and refurbishing requirements.
Challenge yourself to increase capacity 10 percent without spending one additional dollar. At first, this may appear nonsensical: if you could increase capacity without spending money, you would already have done it. In reality, most of us aren’t very creative when it comes to these types of exercises. Aside from asking people to work harder, what other possibilities are there? Here are some tactics that small companies have found to be effective. First, experiment with running equipment during transitional periods. Most of you may be saying to yourself that you run your equipment steadily over three shifts, but what about the time between shifts: lunch periods, employee breaks, and shift changes? When our company’s capacity was being stretched to the limit, we realized that even though the machinery our employees operated was automatic, they put the machines on hold for the 20 minutes in which they ate lunch. This meant we were losing not only 20 minutes but 5 minutes to shut it down before lunch and 5 minutes to start it up when they returned. Multiplying this by three shifts, we saw that we were losing 1.5 hours daily. If we could find a way to use this time, we could increase capacity by 6.25 percent. We began staggering employee lunches from nonmanufacturing departments to monitoring operating equipment when the manufacturing people were having lunch. While we had to do a bit of training, it wasn’t much since monitoring the equipment was relatively easy. With almost no expenditures, we increased capacity by 6.25 percent. A second option is move to a four-shift operation in which your equipment is running 24 hours a day, seven days a week. This isn’t feasible for everyone; employees of many companies with
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2/27/07 9:56:43 AM