Productivity

In every manufacturing company there is a flow of container transport to the work places (tour and return). But often there are numerous losses & waste associated with delays and/ or non-compliant supplies of containers. The annual costs associated with these types of losses & waste, together with the annual lost […]

Although the 5S method is the basis of management, often the 5S concept simply remains a rather meaningless slogan in some companies.
It is often the case that after several years since the “completion of 5S implementation”, some managers still have questions like: “Why 5S to us?”.
Managers say th […]

Even if all companies would like to be able to use all the resources they have to their fullest extent and to completely eliminate all losses & waste, often their actions are not part of a real culture of improvement.
Recently, I visited a few companies that highlighted equipment issues (especially breakdown and mino […]

Should an equipment/line that has significant variations between the standard and the actual cycle time be declared in a breakdown state? (standard cycle time lower than actual cycle time).
Sometimes I have this discussion in factories. Do you have standard cycle time on equipment/line? Do you measure the differences bet […]

Every manufacturing company must do the set-up (changeover) activity. Without this activity the work cannot be carried out and the flexibility imposed by the clients’ requests cannot be ensured.
But I often meet companies that do not have a standard time for each type of set-up or at least for the most frequent, co […]

Lately, the working method (direct operators, indirect operators, set-ups, lines and individual equipment) has been one of my concerns in several factories.
Often the challenge of managers is common: significant cycle times differences in their processes similar to those of other plants in the group (especially in bottle […]

1. Introduction

The continuous synchronization of the basic flow of the companies and the profitability of this flow is and will remain an eternal challenge of the manufacturing company to ensure the eternal prosperity in a global market. Even if different approaches are used to achieve lead time reduction […]

Some managers and practitioners are wrong when they want to improve their productivity to increase production. The level of productivity does not depend on the volume of production. Production and productivity are completely different subjects. Productivity does not improve only by increasing production and vice versa.

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To be honest, many of those who make improvements just review what has already been designed.
Often real-time business managers say:

we need an improvement in price competitiveness on the basis of a continuous and flexible reduction of unit costs;

we would like to reform the current profit structure so we can inte […]