Reducing Error to Boost Efficiency
Reducing error to boost efficiency is an often overlooked strategy when considering how to get the most out of your manufacturing plant. With reducing human error, that operational goal seems a little easier to achieve. It’s not uncommon that we see many organizations simply attempting to increase utilization, capacity, or cycle times. These are effective ways to increase your efficiency, but also reducing and/ or minimizing error can unpack many advantages for quality, production, safety, and efficiency.
A Data Driven Approach to Error:
Data-first approaches have proven to empower operations with vast advantages, proactive cultures, and systematic efficiency improvements in recent years. Not only does data play a huge role in our everyday lives, it’s crucial to specific manufacturing processes and if not monitored or treated with care, can cause undue stress in the workplace. This is why we place emphasis on the importance of the data-first approach. The data-first approach is a data centralized ideology in which all processes, decisions, and production operate around decision-making backed by information. This allows managers and employees to make informed and effective decisions in real-time and on a large-scale basis. Becoming data central is a key step in understanding how to implement digital production systems and without this key culture improvement, all later steps will not be as effective.
Quality, safety, and production systems have long been in the dark when it comes to digital transformation. So, how do you digitize? There are several effective approaches to digitizing your production systems including hardware and software applications. With hardware, data is collected directly from machines and transmitted to a more centralized system or server to view or edit that data. Hardware typically provides high-quality and accurate data. Software has now empowered many plant floor employees to input information that in the past, had typically been documented on paper or excel files on a computer, never to be seen again. Paper is typically used for things such as quality and safety (ex. HACCP documents), but there are many operations that are using paper to document machine production as well that might not have the hardware to collect and distribute the data they’re looking for. Digitizing production systems is a key step to minimizing error and increasing your plant’s efficiency. Here are some solutions that are helping operations like yours turn paper into profit.
When we talk about minimizing error, this is not only on the production floor, but faulty data can typically lead to faulty decision-making, or more error. Error doesn’t only happen in one place; error can happen on the plant floor by an employee or by the machine (not as common as human error), this can also happen once that error gets passed on and takes a snowball effect, eventually causing management to make errors in their decision-making. Let’s separate this into 2 categories:
- Controlled Error
- Controlled error being one in which happens by an employee or human error. Could also be an error by machine hardware reporting inaccurate information.
- Consequence Error
- Consequence error being one that is intended for pragmatic use, but underlying incorrect information enables ineffective decision-making to happen.
Generally, many errors are caught on the plant floor or before they make it to upper-level management, but this still happens quite frequently. While minimizing Controlled Errors, plants can reap the benefits of real-time, accurate information from the plant floor.
Manufacturing plants can take proactive steps to minimize Controlled Error by implementing smart, digital production systems including a healthy mix of hardware and software. Hardware and software combinations empower managers and employees with real-time information that helps them monitor manufacturing flows and quality. Innovative software solutions on the market allow you to set alerting functions, parameters for entry measures, set up custom logic calculations to eliminate paperwork time, and review data on the plant floor for accuracy.
How does this help boost efficiency? Less time spent on reactivity allows you to focus on what’s most important and boost your workforce productivity. Reducing error on the plant floor can help you reduce rework, improve first-time passes, and optimize cycle times for just a few examples. Receiving the right information at the right time gives you the transparency you need, the time you want, and the results you are expected to hit. Not only does minimizing error boost your efficiency, but it also improves your customer satisfaction and you can reap benefits in many other areas as well. To learn more about unlocking higher achievement in your current plant, see our recent blog article on: The Hidden Factory.