In our experience, coordinated and open communication has been one of the key factors in improving efficiency at manufacturing plants. However, it’s also one of the most overlooked factors. For the rest of your manufacturing processes to work as effectively as possible, there has to be an improved level of communication. We’ll tell you our top 3 reasons why and how to make it happen at your company below.
#1: Keep Employees Engaged.
Employee engagement and productivity is an ongoing problem for manufacturers. According to a recent study from Gallup, only 25 percent of all manufacturing employees would say that they are engaged while at work; that’s 8 percent lower engagement than the national average. Disengaged employees are much more likely to make mistakes and otherwise work inefficiently. The same Gallup study found disengaged employees cost US employers more than $400 billion in lost productivity every year.
One way to start combatting the issue of engagement is to open lines of communication and give employees easier access to necessary information. Simple actions like publishing the plant’s schedule and creating communication channels shows your team that everyone’s role is valuable to the overall success of the plant. It helps each person understand that they’re more than a cog in a wheel and gives them a sense of purpose that leads to an increased ownership in their work. According to a study from researchers at Michigan State University and University of Minnesota, employees’ sense of ownership for their job is positively associated with both commitment to the organization and improved work performance.
#2: Facilitate Feedback
At many plants, communication between different teams, departments or shifts can be challenging. The buildings are huge, making it difficult to track down individuals, and many employees may not have easy access to a desk or computer at work. The equipment can be noisy and everyone is busy, so it’s not always easy to hop on a computer and send an email when an issue pops up. Without an open dialogue between employees, more errors are missed and problems pile up, eating your team’s valuable time.
Facilitating clearer and more frequent communication between employees at all levels can help create a more cohesive work environment throughout the plant. If everyone at your facility is able to comment on the plant’s schedule and communicate about issues that pop up, employees can point out concerns that are often overlooked, coordinate efforts to address issues and bring new approaches to the forefront. Ultimately, frequent two-way communication makes your whole team’s job easier and keeps the flow of work moving efficiently.
#3: Boost Your Bottom Line.
As we mentioned earlier, employee disengagement is an expensive drain on your business, costing US employers billions of dollars every year. Those breakdowns in productivity result in supply chain mistakes, excessive changeover time and costly remakes. When trying to keep costs as low as possible, these can cause a real problem for manufacturers. However, when communication is more streamlined, it can result in big savings. According to business consulting firm Flint Strategic Partners, open lines of communication have been found to improve manufacturers’ bottom line by 10 percent or more.
Using VirtECS Symphony To Simplify Communication
You may place communication as a priority at your plant, but it can still be challenging to determine how you’ll keep improving it. That is where VirtECS Symphony comes in. VirtECS Symphony is an amazing communication benefit to our scheduling software for advanced manufacturing. It’s a web-based module that allows everyone in the plant to easily access the VirtECS schedule. We’ve worked with clients who have chosen to display the schedule to hundreds of daily users on screens throughout their facility and others who let employees check it on their own digital devices. Each person can toggle between the plant’ overall schedule and their own individual piece of the process, which will help everyone stay fully informed.
In addition, VirtECS Symphony is customizable, expandable and continually updated to keep up with development within the VirtECS technology. It follows industry standard security protocols and is able to integrate customer authentication and usernames to help track comments appropriately. The comment system is also an extremely powerful bidirectional communication mechanism that can embed XML and JSON to power features such as field schedule editing suggestions and evaluation of schedule compliance.
To learn more about how VirtECS Symphony can coordinate distributed schedule activity and enable better communication in your company, shoot us a message at info@combination.com or download our Symphony overview using the form below.
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