productivity

The goal of productivity is to facilitate the production of as many quality pieces in accordance with the current and especially future takt time level. This is a real, visible and especially expected productivity.
The production of quality pieces depends first and foremost on the effectiveness and efficiency of the cycl […]

Companies are aware that production planning has to take into account each type of set-up time.
Practitioners admit that they need set-up time standardization (SOP for set-up) for: (1) increasing flexibility and (2) continually improving set-up time. Sometimes, it is difficult for them to convince managers that for this […]

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 […]

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.

[…]