oops!...i did it again - broadway part 2

Following last week’s blog with another ode to a song and the shop floor. While the lyrics make no sense as far as production is concerned, the title does stir in me a certain desire to talk production.

We’re discussing the key things that a production system can do for you. The industry calls it a Manufacturing Execution System (MES) or Manufacturing Operations Management (MOM). There’s also Manufacturing Resource Planning (MRP) and Advanced Planning System (APS). That’s a lot of acronyms for what essentially boils down to a digital production assistant.

Not to make light of it. Without one, you are operating in the Dark Ages. And that’s where Britney comes back in. And, as she says in the lyrics, you’re “not so innocent.”

production operations

We covered the 4-phase business cycle preferred by Alan and Brian Beaulieu last week. (If you haven’t seen the picture, make sure you catch it here.) The numbers would say that we are in the Slowing Growth phase (C by their methodology), which goes into a recession phase (D) – not recession in the specific sense of the word, but rather where numbers are mostly negative and ready to inflect in the reverse.

In their methodology, you track year-over-year (YOY) numbers and mostly on trailing schedules. Think of adding up a rolling 12-month number every 30 days and reporting it, looking at the differential from the last time that you posted. This eliminates the smaller inflections that your business feels and lets you focus on the big picture. Here in April 2025, you would add up the monthly results from February 2024 through March 2025 for your rolling 12.

As you enter this phase C, the YOY numbers are still posting positive, but the rate-of-change is declining and that’s how you know you’re in a Slowing Growth phase. Too much economics? Let’s talk production!

Your team can only work at a certain rate of speed, so their rate of production should be constant, right?

Nope.

paperless manufacturing

On the shop floor, production rate is on one end of the see saw, while quality balances it on the other. Push on the rate of production too hard and you risk quality issues. But there are things you can do to raise production rate and I’m going back to our MES / MOM / MRP / APS discussion above. Pick your plan, but these tools do help (or should, if you get the right one) your rate.

There are two critical factors here: the availability of information, materials, and workers and the ability to pivot when something goes wrong. If you can provide your team with everything they need to do the work and to solve a problem when something goes wrong (and it always does in manufacturing), you are on course to increase production rate.

We discussed last week taking the pivot in Phase A. This is where the turn is and where the best decisions are made to invest in the business and make the climb out of the “rut” steeper, so you gain more on the backside. However, I would argue that, provided you have the right team and the right vendor, there is no ideal time to implement a system like this. It will change the way you do things. It will help you in some areas – immediately, even – and it will highlight issues that you have to solve in others.

And that brings us back to Britney. When your team doesn’t have these tools, when they operate in a paper-based environment where people are trying to decide what to do without the help of a tool that can manage the changes instantly, there’s a lot more chaos. And that means errors. We see a pattern in manufacturers that we work with: the errors that happen and the bottlenecks that we see often repeat. Sometimes the floor knows about them and you just haven’t had time to address them (or you don’t know how to). Other times, the issues are hidden behind an ever-busy schedule and the need to get the product to the dock.

Let’s take the “oops” out of manufacturing and make your team the most productive it can be. No matter what phase you’re in (or the economy for that matter), we have the ability to make a real difference in your business. We’re entering our 30^th year of business and we are here to help you. Reach out and let us know how we can.