Best practices
The key factors of adherence to discrete industrial production objectives
The strategies to improve adherence to discrete production objectives
The advantages of adherence to discrete production objectives
So in the end, is adherence to discrete industrial production objectives really possible?
Discrete industrial production is quite simply the process of manufacturing distinct products. The final products are easily identifiable and differ greatly from process manufacturing, where the products are undifferentiated such as, for example, oil, natural gas, or salt.
Discrete industrial production is quite simply the process of manufacturing distinct products. The final products are easily identifiable and differ greatly from process manufacturing, where the products are undifferentiated such as, for example, oil, natural gas, or salt.
The products manufactured in discrete production can be counted, sorted, and above all tracked individually, and include, for example, vehicles, furniture, toys, smartphones, or even aircraft. Discrete production very often involves the use of other parts or components and sub-assembly processes to manufacture the final product.
Adherence to production objectives is obviously essential for industrial companies; it allows them to maintain high quality standards, to maximize their productivity, and to minimize costs.
Indeed, rigorous adherence to objectives makes it possible to guarantee that the manufactured products meet the required quality standards and to prevent any delivery delay, which of course improves customer satisfaction and strengthens the company's image.
Moreover, this can also improve the company's productivity by reducing downtime and production delays.
Finally, adherence to objectives can help minimize costs by reducing production errors, avoiding product returns, and minimizing raw material losses. This can help the company achieve maximum profitability.
Adherence to discrete production objectives is therefore a crucial issue for overall performance and profitability at all levels, but is it really possible to achieve it?
Production objectives: They must be precise and above all realistic. To do so, you will have to take into account all the resources but also study the data accumulated over the previous years to establish probabilities concerning the different types of unforeseen events (breakdowns, absences, etc.).
The production plan : Assess the load, determine the capacities, take into account time and budget constraints, and ensure that the plan is feasible and flexible so it can be modified in case of an unforeseen event.
The supply chain: Also ensure that each stage of the production chain is able to meet the production needs.
Motivated and well-trained employees: The employees must obviously be competent and trained to perform the production tasks effectively and in compliance with the production objectives, but also motivated and listened to, which will have a positive impact on absenteeism.
Machines, equipment, and software: Companies must have the tools and technologies necessary to support production, such as machines and production-management software for example.
Strict quality standards: The quality standards must be defined clearly and rigorously to guarantee that the products meet the required requirements.
Solving problems and unforeseen events: It is the teams' anticipation and responsiveness as well as the implementation of effective solutions that will often make the difference in the face of the unavoidable unforeseen events.
Rigorous planning and risk management
This is the crux of the matter, yet even today many industrial sites work on tools that do not make it possible to run load-capacity simulations, and that also do not make it possible to report data in real time to carry out genuine monitoring. The weekly update of the Excel file, for example, then becomes a key moment of the week.
Moreover, assuming that a planner has the time to update an Excel file, the more humans intervene in the calculation process, the more the risk of error inevitably increases.
This is why several manufacturers are turning today toward solutions and software that offer all these possibilities and that make it possible to react and act effectively in the face of unforeseen events.
Indeed, planning 4.0 must absolutely take into account the probable evolution of loads and capacities, and must also be able to cope with unforeseen events by allowing a real-time update of the data and by making it possible to quickly launch new simulations.
The monitoring and measurement of production performance
Monitoring your production's performance means being able to decide when and where to apply corrective measures to adjust processes in case of deviation from the objectives.
It is monitoring and also a fine analysis of your KPIs that will allow you to make continuous-improvement decisions (improvement of routings, reduction of lead time, of WIP...).
The use of real-time monitoring and measurement tools is indispensable to increase your production rate or your service level. Once again, while an Excel spreadsheet can do the job, its lack of accuracy and regular updates could mislead you.
To monitor your KPIs in real time, there are today solutions like Oplit that make it possible to track the progress rate of a site, at all its levels, and that also allows a group to obtain a multi-site view that facilitates the comparison of inter-site competitiveness on production criteria.
Employee training
Integrating new technologies (machines, software...) will require your employees a necessary training time to learn to master them.
Some of your employees will see these new features as blessings, valuable aids in their daily tasks, but it is also not uncommon for some profiles, at first sight, to reject these changes for fear of seeing their job distorted or even threatened.
The training will then have to cover the purely technical aspect, but also change management. Reassuring your employees and demonstrating to them that the technology will give them back time that they can allocate to tasks with higher added value will not be superfluous.
The objective will be to keep your employees motivated and fulfilled in order to get the best out of each of them.
There are several advantages to adhering as much as possible to production objectives, notably:
An improvement in quality and brand image: By respecting the discrete production objectives, companies can improve the quality of their products. This can translate into increased customer satisfaction, a reduction in returns, and an improvement in the company's reputation.
Increased productivity: By following clear and precise production objectives, companies can improve their productivity by reducing downtime, production delays, and production errors. This can also translate into an increase in production and an improvement in the company's profitability.
A reduction in costs : Adherence to discrete production objectives can help reduce production costs by minimizing raw material losses, product returns, and production errors. This can help achieve maximum profitability while maintaining the required quality standards.
Better planning: By having clear and precise production objectives, companies can better plan their production and their related operations. This can help avoid production delays and improve stock management.
Satisfied and motivated employees : The main driver of the virtuous circle of adherence to production objectives!
At the risk of stating the obvious, since the unforeseen is by definition difficult to foresee, it will always be complicated to adhere 100% to production objectives, however relevant they may be.
However, the emergence of technological solutions offers companies the possibility of integrating margins of error and of anticipating and managing unforeseen events as well as possible.
And it is this capacity for granular steering that will help industrial groups increase their adherence rate.
Without forgetting the human resources, the brains and the energy behind the tools.
