{"id":2764,"date":"2010-05-12T18:44:52","date_gmt":"2010-05-12T22:44:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/delmiaworks\/are-you-tracking-your-manufacturing-downtime-costs\/"},"modified":"2010-05-12T18:44:52","modified_gmt":"2010-05-12T22:44:52","slug":"are-you-tracking-your-manufacturing-downtime-costs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/delmiaworks\/are-you-tracking-your-manufacturing-downtime-costs\/","title":{"rendered":"Are You Tracking Your Manufacturing Downtime Costs?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"tracking<\/a>I have been in the manufacturing business for more than 18 years.\u00a0 When I first started, I was working in accounting and then moved over to operations.\u00a0 It was all about dollars and cents and what we could improve to be more profitable<\/strong>.\u00a0 The plant manager was a great teacher and focused on continuous improvement.\u00a0 He would have us look at the root cause of an issue and tell us to “fix it or else.”\u00a0 We all knew that “or else” meant having a job the next day or not so we took this suggestion seriously.<\/p>\n

Identifying Production Costs<\/h2>\n

First, we started to look at our plant utilization based on the production reports that were being entered into our ERP system<\/a>.\u00a0 We started to review our downtime reports to track what truly was keeping our machines from running.\u00a0 We found that setups were not being started when they were supposed to due to a lack of labor and machines were sitting idle due to a lack of material or machine operators.<\/p>\n

Next, we started to evaluate<\/a> why we didn’t have enough labor for machine setups.\u00a0 One reason found was that the scheduler was scheduling multiple jobs to be setup at the same time.\u00a0 We started to look at minimizing the number of setups within a shift.\u00a0 We decided to put two people on a setup which allowed the setup to take half the time that it would normally take.\u00a0 So far, so good.\u00a0 But soon reality showed that there were times we truly did need additional setup technicians due to the demand coming in from the customers.\u00a0 After reviewing the cost of the machine sitting down due to setups, we found that it was costing us more than hiring a new setup\/process technician.\u00a0 So we hired a couple of setup technicians to keep our shop running.<\/p>\n

Our next step was to look at why we didn’t have operators to run the jobs. We established that there had been a cut back in the number of operators per shift because of the previously mentioned setup issues coupled with wanting to eliminate having operators being paid to just sit around.\u00a0 Since we fixed the setup issues, we could better utilize our labor capacity reports to determine how many operators we needed for each shift.\u00a0 While we still maintained a minimal direct labor force, we also hired temporary employees as needed for certain machines\/jobs to backfill labor where it was truly needed.<\/p>\n

Lastly, we tackled the issue of raw material.\u00a0 We found that the machine monitoring<\/a> system was accounting for cycles that the production<\/a> report but our actual people were not.\u00a0 This was an eye-opening gap in material consumption and inventory management<\/a> that would not have been identified without our ERP software.\u00a0 It was discovered that during the setup of certain jobs, more scrap was being produced than what was originally accounted for in the creation of BOM’s.\u00a0 There were two things we reviewed: how to cut back on the scrap being produced and should we update the BOM’s to more accurately reflect the setup process.\u00a0 Depending on the part being produced we modified our records accordingly and the gains were significant.<\/p>\n

To see the changes we had made using the information from the system was great.\u00a0 I still use this information today when assisting other companies with their internal issues.<\/p>\n

To view another success utilization story, we invite you to read about Donnelly Custom Manufacturing<\/a>.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have been in the manufacturing business for more than 18 years.\u00a0 When I first started, I was working in accounting and then moved over to operations.\u00a0 It was all about dollars and cents and what we could improve to<\/p>\n... Continued<\/a>","protected":false},"author":555,"featured_media":2765,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,29,1],"tags":[226],"class_list":["post-2764","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-all-posts","category-erp-technology-and-automation","category-uncategorized","tag-production-scheduling"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/delmiaworks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2764","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/delmiaworks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/delmiaworks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/delmiaworks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/555"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/delmiaworks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2764"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/delmiaworks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2764\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/delmiaworks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2765"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/delmiaworks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2764"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/delmiaworks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2764"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/delmiaworks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2764"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}