The Three Areas of Your Shop - Processes

“Manufacturing is all the same; it just looks different.” I’ve found this to be both true and false. In the “same” category, we’re talking about the top three issues you need to be concerned with: people, process and inventory/materials. One thing common among all manufacturers, whether you make or buy the products you sell, is that you all need to know what you’re doing from day to day and who’s going to do it. You need the basic materials to do the work and instructions on how to do so – and these instructions could simply be who’s doing what, when, or exactly how they’re supposed to be doing it depending on the complexity of the work at hand.

We talked about people and the key learning there is that, without a proper system for production, you are giving them scant information to do their job and they are likely suffering from it. Quietly, perhaps, which translates to digs into your bottom line. It’s hard to know by how much or where because you, too, are suffering by not having a system to tell you that information.

Your Process

The process you use could be proprietary or public. Either way, it’s taken you a lifetime to create just the right one to be most productive. Or, perhaps, you don’t yet know the right way because you don’t know how long things take and/or how correct they are. Systems will never replace the good people you have but they will help your people to do their work better. Systems provide information faster than humans can gather it. They remember that information and can send it back to you in a format that’s most useful – written or visual.

How do you capture the process(es) you use? Are they planned in advance and delivered directly to the people doing the work or are they tacked on whiteboards? Processes – even picking and shipping goods – are the basis of the work your team is doing every day. It’s where you can make (or lose) money rapidly.

We believe in writing down processes. It makes it easier to train new people, shift people to different work, implement changes in how you do things and even remind the most experienced members of your staff how you want work to be done. It’s only in capturing a written process that you are able to compare what you did with what you planned to do and determine how you performed.

And, when we talk performance, we’re not talking about jobs complete or orders shipped. Those are easy numbers to track. We’re suggesting that if you didn’t happen to be sitting at the area that’s shipping as they packed the work up and sent it off, you might not completely know how it’s being done and if you’re making any money at it.

Your process simplified

For every customer we work with, we try to identify the key areas or stages of their production process. What are the repeatable steps they will take? Are there enough workers to do the work or does a particular step require someone with a special certification? Break it down into the simplest and most effective set of steps with enough information to ensure accuracy. This goes beyond a routing and a single line item.

your process repeated