The most overlooked opportunity for increasing production capacity in manufacturing plants is planned downtime.  Because changeovers and maintenance are planned, we tend to accept them as normal or something that must be done.  After a closer look, you may realize that these planned events are the largest contributor to your production losses.  Attacking planned downtime will not only reduce inefficiencies in your operations, but more importantly let you claw back some valuable production time to increase your capacity and help grow your business. 

You’ve been here before: operations seem to be doing just fine, until you check the numbers and see that output is not keeping pace. You should be taking on more orders, but you’re having trouble keeping up with the ones you have. So what do you do?

When thinking through your operation and how to best organize it to complete the work, you’ve most likely weighed prioritizing labor productivity rates versus prioritizing labor availability. This is actually a critical question, and one with implications on customer service that are not fully appreciated across an operation. 

You’ve probably reached what you thought was the limit of how far your cycle times could be reduced. And when that happens, you start to wonder if there’s something else to be done so that you can deliver to the customer faster and quit feeling like you’re treading water just to stay afloat. 

You probably think you can’t afford to pay employees any more than you already do. It makes sense on the surface, but digging deeper, you have to ask what you could gain if you paid more and how that might affect your stance.

US Manufacturing is lagging behind the overall economy in growth, according to the Institute for Supply Management’s Purchasing Managers Index (PMI). The sector is seeing limited growth, however, with a PMI above 60%.