2009 December Issue – Increase Output 10% Quickly Without Adding People or Production Machines

Manufacturing is a complex process.  It is intricate, complicated and typically slow to change.  Shop floor attendance fluctuates daily.  Product runs change every hour.  Machinery maintenance cuts into your production time and daily decisions provide a challenge.  While you push for continual improvement to remain competitive, the wrong choice can be costly.

What if you could increase production without adding people or new production machines?  In order to do so, you need to improve throughput.  If your workforce, your workflow, and your equipment remains constant, what could provide this leverage?  A move to paperless operations eliminates the cost of creating, distributing, correcting and collecting paper instructions and data sheets.  This reduction in cost is in both time and money, making it a productivity magnifier.  Yet throughput is more than simply how many jobs are completed on the production line, you need to be concerned about how many of your manufacturing jobs pass inspection, both at your facility and at the customer. 

Do you experience turnbacks?  It is next to impossible to link turnbacks to specific actions by your workforce, your workflow or your equipment unless you utilize tools that enable you to reduce them and track them.  Only an electronic system can do that for you.  The extended benefits of higher quality and lot tracking multiply the productivity again. 

How do you measure the benefits of electronic work systems?  Metrics and returns are where the rubber meets the road.  It’s how you know that your system improvements had the desired effect.  All paperless systems have some common characteristics:

• Work instructions are updated and available continuously.  You never have to walk around looking again.
• Omissions are eliminated.  System verifications prevent work from advancing unless all steps are completed. 
• Out of sequence operations are prevented.  Procedural enforcement ensures that the work flow is complete in the proper order every time. 
• Work signoffs are enforced.  Prevent work from advancing unless completion is measured and captured. 
• Emergent work is allowed through electronic processes.  Supervision is not required.
• Operations can use time and motion studies to optimize work.  Get real time data to and from the shop floor. 
• Continuous monitoring of tooling increases productivity.  Get notification for calibration and machine usage instantly. 

CIMx customers have used Interax to double production without adding engineers.  They’ve done it without adding machines.  One customer cut production time by 30%, decreased quality turnbacks and kept staff levels consistent.  Another customer doubled production.  In every case, there was a cost and time savings far greater than that of merely replacing the paper processes with a digital system. 

The average savings for CIMx customers is $1,000,000 per year across a large shop floor with a project ROI of less than one year.  The savings are scaled down in smaller plants to $400,000 to $600,000 annually with a similar ROI.

Don’t delay in investigating a paperless system.  The savings are accumulating for your competitors who do.  Will you be able to keep up?