Scenario analysis for process improvement and throughput can be very valuable, but tedious, error prone, and impossible to do well with only a spreadsheet or simulator. Using VirtECS allows you to look at scheduling options with a speed and detail that were previously unachievable.
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Those who work in manufacturing know that getting a product from the beginning to the end of production is an incredibly complex and time-consuming procedure. The whole process is made more complicated by factors such as equipment designs, industry regulations, and employee schedules.
However, your plant’s constraints don’t have to be limitations on production. Instead, view them as pieces to the puzzle of your production schedule. While every business is unique, there are a few common constraints we help our clients solve. Keep reading to discover the issues caused by each of these constraints and how we recommend solving for them.
At your manufacturing plant, I’m sure you can identify a few crucial raw products that are essential to production. When there are inevitable disruptions to the supply chain, or if your inventory storage capacity is limited, you might find yourself short on these necessary materials. Delaying the start of a production run does not bode well for on-time deliveries, and ultimately, customer satisfaction.
In order to stay on top of supply chain delays and keep accurate material records, consider using inventory management software. This tool provides a platform for employees to update inventory records and track the current supply and demand of different materials in one place. Pairing this software with regular inventory inspections can help your organization better plan around potential shortages or delays. You can sidestep avoidable surprises, errors and wasted time.
Regular machine maintenance is crucial to help prevent sudden breakdowns and costly downtime at your facility. A number of industries, particularly those that work with pharmaceuticals or medical equipment, also require a strict cleaning regimen between production runs. If these regulations are not performed at optimal times, the cleaning can cause delays and eat up valuable production time. It may be easy to chalk these delays up as unavoidable, but the truth is, cleaning can be organized into your production plan with little to no disruption.
If you want to limit the cleaning process’s interference with regular manufacturing activities, we recommend scheduling maintenance as you would any other production process. This will give you time to analyze your production schedule and find opportunities to fit in maintenance without limiting the rest of production.
Throughout the production process, there will be certain tasks and responsibilities that only employees with specific training or experience can complete. Meanwhile, you may also have processes that run most efficiently when multiple employees are working on it at the same time. If your schedule does not account for these specifications, you risk developing a bottleneck and extending run times.
One potential solution is the implementation of a resource allocation tool. This kind of software can help quickly identify a number of workable schedule options that specify the optimal distribution of employees across the plant floor. Resource allocation software can also help determine if potential investments in labor, such as hiring additional employees, will generate a positive return. With this scheduling data, you’ll know that your plant floor is as well distributed as possible.
Combatting extended periods of downtime between processes is an ongoing challenge on the plant floor. Even if things seem to be running smoothly on the surface, there may be hidden bottlenecks that are hindering your production efficiency. These constraints are driving up costs and decreasing your plant’s overall possible output.
In order to improve your plant’s run rate, you must identify all possible bottlenecks and potential efficiency improvements in your system. The easiest way to do this is with scheduling software, which can analyze your entire process to find the points of congestion. These features can help you decrease downtime and find unique production scheduling solutions to problems you may not have known you had.
VirtECS is an advanced planning and scheduling tool that has been designed to specifically solve these kinds of manufacturing constraints, along with many others. VirtECS is able to fully enforce all cross-area constraints and combine with other necessary tools to fully customize the handling of product-to-product timing and changeovers. As a result, VirtECS produces only feasible and executable production schedules that fit your plant’s specific needs. If you’re interested in learning more about how VirtECS can increase efficiency at your plant, download our guide here.
If your manufacturing planning and scheduling systems still depend heavily on manual processes, you’re not alone. Research from Edge Research has shown 50% of manufacturing companies still rely on manual efforts to plan and monitor their supply chain activities.
Rather than using employees’ time and energy on complicated manual calculations, consider allowing automated processes to handle these equations to give your planning and scheduling department more time to spend on valuable supervision. Using software for these processes can help relieve many of the pain points that every manufacturer deals with. We’ll give some examples of how reducing manual scheduling calculations can benefit your manufacturing business below.
From a logistics standpoint, scheduling software programs can factor in many more constraints to an equation than a manual process realistically could. When these constraints affect each other, as they so often do, the complexity continues to grow exponentially. Scheduling software can take in detailed data about equipment, labor, materials, and other plant constraints, while still generating a viable schedule in a fraction of the time a manual process would require. With this added accountability within the system, manufacturing schedules will become more accurate. When every detail is accounted for and included in the scheduling process, you’ll feel confident that your plant is always working from the most optimized schedule possible.
In any calculation that is performed manually, there is always a risk of human error. Out of every 100 steps completed, a human will make about 10 mistakes on average, according to the Institute for Robotic Process Automation. Because planning and scheduling processes are so interconnected, even just one mistake made along the way can have a significant ripple effect. When errors are made in production, the plant must perform more re-runs, which result in decreased efficiency and higher costs. However, when these complicated calculations are completed with software, accidental errors are all but eliminated. The money and time your plant would usually spend fixing mistakes can instead be invested into continuous improvements.
Speaking of saving time, when software is used to automatically create schedules, your planners and schedulers can put the hours they spent on manual calculations to more constructive use. The data input process becomes much more streamlined, freeing up their time for more supervision and output analysis. This is not only more beneficial for the plant itself, but it is also more rewarding work for employees. According to data from Hubspot, 22% of an employee’s time is spent on repetitive tasks, such as manual calculations. Spending a long period of time performing repetitive and monotonous tasks can have a negative effect on employees’ work performance, as well as their overall satisfaction at work. When schedules are created through software, employees are able to devote more time to learning new areas the business, finding areas of improvement and better applying their knowledge to the company.
VirtECS is an advanced manufacturing planning and scheduling software tool that can reduce the need for manual calculations. Our software handles data integration to generate a plant schedule that accounts for current and future demands, plant equipment, current inventory levels, and process flow. VirtECS has been implemented at leading companies in chemical, consumer products, electronics, food and beverage, and pharmaceutical industries. If you’re interested in learning more about VirtECS and the ways it can optimize your plant’s production, please download on our guide here.
Because of the inherently complex and segmented nature of manufacturing operations, it can be difficult to establish productive communication habits among departments and employees. Unfortunately, these ineffective communication methods are causing major disruptions to manufacturing operations. According to Forrester, 75% of manufacturing delays occur because employees are unable to communicate with coworkers or supervisors on the production floor.
To save time and become a more efficient plant overall, manufacturers must look to stimulate and encourage communication among their employees. We’ve compiled our best tips on improving manufacturing communication to hopefully provide some inspiration for your own organization.
Manufacturing leaders have a responsibility to show they prioritize feedback if they want the entire organization to be more communicative. If those at the top aren’t proactively communicating with the rest of the organization, they can’t expect employees to be the ones to reach out first. Supervisors who reach out to their employees for updates will empower those they work with to ask questions in return. Those questions should then be answered quickly, and the cycle of effective and simple communication continues.
As people throughout the company notice the increased level of feedback from those near the top, it creates a culture of communication. Employees begin to recognize an expectation of transparency and two-way communication, and therefore tend to follow suit in interacting more frequently with their fellow team members.
Employees deal with feeling burned out frequently, and stress levels have been higher than ever as we continue to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic. Data from a new FlexJobs and Mental Health America survey shows that 75% of US workers have experienced burnout this year. To keep employee morale and retention high, consider implementing a system for employee recognition within your organization.
On a regular basis, make a point to publicly highlight employees who have gone above and beyond on a project, been consistent through challenges, or been especially communicative. This may take the form of a social media post, personal email or mention in the company newsletter. When employees feel recognized and valued by their employer, they’re more likely to continue communicating and working diligently to maintain their high achievement levels. Research has shown that a happy workforce helps increase sales by 37%, boost productivity by 31%, and improve accuracy by 19%.
In many companies, there are no communication tools that allow team members to easily message back and forth. These employees rely only on email, which tends to be disjointed and inefficient for people working at the plant. Employees on the production floor are often unable to access their email at all. However, when communication systems are designed to flow easily alongside other internal information, employees are able to converse and consult each other more frequently. These communication systems keep messages going back and forth alongside the information employees need to access, which is intuitive and convenient.
For best usage, these tools must be compatible for your employees’ devices, so they can quickly send messages wherever they are in the plant. Communication tools should also be able to handle the large number of users your organization may need. To encourage widespread adoption, it’s also helpful if the tools require little training. Otherwise, this new system may have too many barriers, and it will become just another means of cumbersome communication.
To work most effectively and stay informed, employees should have access to your plant’s production schedule. If the schedule is accessible from your internal communication system, employees can easily toggle between their conversation with colleagues and the information they need to reference. With this system, you could enable employees to see what the rest of the plant is working on, giving them greater insight into how their work affects the entire company. They may even be able to give constructive comments or find improvements that others have missed. The end result is a highly knowledgeable, productive and satisfied workforce.
VirtECS Symphony is a user-friendly solution to manufacturers’ communication challenges. This tool works as a web-based counterpart to VirtECS, our scheduling software for advanced manufacturing. Through VirtECS Symphony, everyone in the plant is able to access the production schedule from their own digital devices and discuss questions or concerns with their fellow employees. It can handle hundreds of users and is continually updated to match development within the VirtECS planning and scheduling technology. For more information on VirtECS Symphony, please download our guide.
People are the reason the wheels of the business keep turning. This is true of any company, especially those in the manufacturing industry. The employees working on the floor of manufacturing facilities are essential to the actual production of products, which is what our business is all about.
However, companies that operate without an effective strategy for hiring or distributing their workforce often create a slow-moving business wheel. According to IndustryWeek, this can result in lost time, increased burnout, and ultimately a reduced level of overall production. To make the most cost-effective decisions regarding your workforce, strategic manufacturers must find unique ways to use scheduling data.
For your plant to make best use of resources and time, you must find the optimal distribution of your employees across all positions and shifts. One of the most efficient ways to discover the best dispersion of employees is to use a resource allocation tool. This kind of software allows you to input your various detailed facility needs and constraints. The best tools are flexible, letting you set the minimum number of people needed for each task during each shift. Some even allow you to input the required skill level.
A resource allocation tool can generate a variety of hypothetical options, allowing you to decide on the ideal distribution of employees in your plant schedule. This flexibility can also help determine if adding an extra employee to a certain shift will produce a positive return, or if that person could be better allocated elsewhere. Armed with this data, you can be assured that your plant is working with the most effectively distributed workforce possible.
Based on the data you received from resource allocation, you will be able to decide whether or not you need to hire additional employees in order to reach your desired output. If paying an additional employee for 40 hours of work will create enough product to recoup the cost, it may be worth it to add that extra position. However, you may also find that the output will not be higher than the employee’s total compensation, and it’s best to explore additions elsewhere.
Some plants may approach resource allocation differently. Manufacturers who aren’t able to hire as many new positions as they would like are faced with deciding which hires would be the most impactful. Sample labor models can help these companies measure the effect of each individual new position and compare the results to make the most cost-effective decisions. If these companies are able to continue hiring in the future, they can revisit this tool and find the next most effective new position.
Another way to increase your plant’s productivity is to help your existing team produce a higher output. These improvements will often require additional training to help employees learn where they can advance their skills and minimize mistakes. If your team’s duties involve software and other advanced technology, consider developing training materials that will expand on the various features and functionalities. Spending a bit of time documenting a deeper knowledge of these tools can help speed up the learning curve.
In order to create time for this training, you may consider using a scheduling tool to plan time around your production schedule. Consider scheduling these blocks of training time like you do planned maintenance to cause minimal disruption to the overall system.
An advanced manufacturing planning & scheduling tool, such as VirtECS, will have the beneficial resource allocation feature built into the software. VirtECS has the unique ability to create a model of your entire manufacturing plant, including employees, equipment and all of their constraints. We hear from our clients all the time how valuable it is to have a resource allocation tool that is so flexible and specific. For more information on using VirtECS at your facility, please fill out the form at the bottom of our News & Insight page.
