Wouldn’t you love to be the hero who finds a way to save your manufacturing company money simply by changing a few small daily routines that are wasting time and money? Of course you do, and it’s easier than you think!
Every day there are a bevy of repetitive tasks that the workers in your company undergo that can be simplified and made more efficient. Follow this list and see if any of these 7 time-and-money wasters apply to your business:
- Over-production - Making more product means more money, right? Not always! If you are producing more than there is demand, it becomes time-consuming and results in material purchases that drive cost up!
- Unnecessary motion - This relates to people bending, stretching, walking too far, especially as this relates to equipment or necessary devices being too far from the station where they are required. Find a way to bring the equipment to your workers! For example, if your workers have to cross an entire room to a desktop printer, perhaps a model with a smaller footprint, such as the Zebra ZT200 series, would fit better into the immediate work environment.
- Non-value added processing - Meaning that your workers are doing more work than is necessary, often due to poor plant layout or misguided attempts to recover expensive machinery costs. An optimized layout or using simpler, lower cost tools can eliminate this wasteful type of activity.
- Excess inventory - Things such as work-in-process between operations or purchased parts within the supply chain lead to cost and clutter. Costs skyrocket because of increased lead-times, excessive floor space requirements, extra handling, high interest charges, avoidable people movement (see #2 above!) and paperwork. Sometimes simply tracking which inventory is accumulating or where it is being routed can help your company determine when they should order more, rather than getting ahead of demand. If volume is an issue for you, why not start tracking these items with bar codes from a printer designed for high-volume, high-performance environments such as the Zebra 105SLPlus?
- Transportation - Unnecessary transport of materials, work-in-process and finished goods does not add any value to the product. Improving your logistics chain can help lower the associated costs but sometimes the best solution is to eliminate or minimize the number of trips a product must make to reach the consumer.
- Defects - Producing defective parts and products adds to manufacturing costs without producing a saleable item. Instead of improving your quality assurance policing, first try to find ways to prevent the occurrence of defects in the first place!
- Waiting - Any time your workers must spend waiting for a step, whether it’s the previous, current or next step in the process, is wasted worker time. Efficiency is the key to a successful business and fully utilising your workers should be first priority, with machines coming in second. Find ways to ensure that your employees are not standing around at any point in the process!
Now that you’re armed with this knowledge, go out and find where your company is being afflicted by these time-wasters and eliminate them! To help you, you can contact the experts here at AbeTech and we can help you identify your needs and find ways to optimize your business today!
