7 Ways to Improve Efficiency at Your Manufacturing Plant

As a manufacturer, you certainly want to achieve goals like increasing productivity, reducing costs, and maximizing profits. Those goals can be achieved if you can increase efficiency at your manufacturing plant. Thus, you need the most advanced supply chain management software to improve your efficiency at your manufacturing plant.

Many manufacturers think that increasing efficiency means cutting costs as much as possible, contributing to decreased product quality. But, there are some easy and harmless ways you can implement to improve efficiency on your manufacturing floor without sacrificing the quality of your products.

The solution is to use the best SCM software in Singapore. With the help of this software, you can eliminate bottlenecks in the supply chain in your company so that you can improve the efficiency and quality of your manufactured products. This automated supply chain management software will undoubtedly help your operational work become faster and more accurate.

This article summarizes seven ways to improve efficiency at your manufacturing plant, including using the most integrated SCM software. You will also find the SCM software pricing scheme calculation to get the description of its price before you decide to implement it. Check out the following article!

1. Evaluate Your Current Workflow

First, you will have difficulty identifying areas for improvement in your manufacturing process without examining your current workflow. You can review the following three critical areas to determine what changes are needed in your workflow:

Labor

A few things you need to figure out regarding your current employee performance are:

• Do they have the right skills to perform the tasks they are currently working on?
• Have they managed to achieve the determined objectives?
• How much time do they spend completing specific jobs?
• Is it possible to speed up the completion time?

Processes

It would help if you found out whether the stages in your production are going as planned. More importantly, discover where the pain points and bottlenecks are.

Before making any changes to your workflow, you should first develop a hypothesis, then compare the results to your assumptions and previous conditions. So, this will give you a clear perspective on what changes should be made.

Related article: Manufacturing Tips: How to Optimize Your Production Planning

Equipment and Technology

Review all the equipment and technology that you are currently using. Does all the equipment work properly? Is the technology that you rely on optimal for your current business needs? How easy is it to make changes in production?

2. Invest in Employee Training

Employee training is an ongoing process. In some industries, especially manufacturing, certain types of training are mandatory, such as daily safety training for all personnel using safety equipment.

You need to train your employees on new equipment and technology to get the most value. Employee training is also an excellent retention tactic because every employee wants to have the opportunity to develop their abilities.

Don’t limit training and education to equipment and technology. Your manufacturing business process will run more smoothly if everyone can understand the company’s policies and the right way to communicate with each other.

3. Update Your Equipment

No matter how great your employees are if the equipment provided at your manufacturing plant is outdated or even no longer works properly, then efficiency will be difficult to improve.

Therefore, make sure you are willing to invest in modern equipment so that the production process can run better. Advanced equipment also helps you reduce costs for repairing damage and increasing the productivity of your employees.

4. Conduct Preventive Maintenance

Even though you have decided to buy the latest tools, that doesn’t mean you have to throw away your old ones. For instance, some equipment may still use for a longer period if treated properly. The new equipment also needs to be well maintained so that it can be used to the fullest.

And as you already know, maintaining equipment is far cheaper than replacing one. Thus, conduct preventive maintenance regularly according to the type of equipment. Then, Consider using asset management software to help you record the condition of your equipment and automate the maintenance schedule.

5. Keep Your Manufacturing Plant Organized

The organization is the key to an efficient workspace. Pay attention to your manufacturing plant, the layout, the spaces for workers and heavy equipment to get in and out, and how used each area.

A few things you need to check:

• Firstly, are all the hand tools easy to find?
• Secondly, are staff able to easily pick up all the raw materials or finished goods?
• Thirdly, is the packing and shipping area close to where the finished goods are placed?
• Last, are the forklifts able to easily move around your manufacturing plant?

6. Reduce Material Waste

One of the biggest and most expensive wastes in manufacturing plants is material waste. Here are some ways to reduce it:

• Use less material while packing your products
• Recycle, or if you can’t do it yourself, then resell the scraps to a recycling center
• Last, utilize all available materials for creating new products

7. Automate Your Supply Chain Management

There is no easier way to improve efficiency than automating your business processes. Using supply chain management is one of the most critical segments in the manufacturing business. But, if the process is still run manually, optimizing efficiency will be difficult to achieve. Therefore, you need to use the most integrated supply chain management, so that you can automate the manufacturing process efficiently. You also will get many other benefits, such as multi-warehouse support, on-time delivery, and sales forecasting. 

Conclusion

With sophisticated supply chain management software, you can automate various processes; from tracking inventory across multiple manufacturing plants, setting up inventory levels, ordering raw materials to suppliers, to shipping orders to customers.

Through the advanced reporting feature in HashMicro’s SCM software, you can forecast demand and the revenue generated from each product. And one important remark is that you also need to know the price calculation of HashMicro’s SCM software so that you can prepare the costs before you implement this software.