Performance Improvement: Manufacturing
9-step checklist to increase profitability and simplify your business
Understand maximum workload/capacity
The barriers preventing you from reaching maximum output in your plants and facilities are usually tied to shortcomings in your systems, processes, or certain behaviours among your staff.
Be strategic with workforce planning
In an era of aging workforces and a shortage of skilled labour, your mandate is to remain competitive despite resource constraints. This means efficiently allocating resources to deal with both slow and busy periods.
Track your operational metrics
The most efficient and well-run businesses are those with a clear picture of how they are performing on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. Leading indicators can alert you of issues and give you time to course correct them before they show up on your financial statements.
Know your ideal inventory level
Knowing your inventory level at any point in time will allow you to know if you’re over (or under) spending.
Firefighting vs. proactive management
Your production supervisors and front-line managers don’t want to spend all their time and resources putting out fires on the production floor. Creating supervisor systems for them will result in proactive management of your production floor and catching issues before they occur.
Align scheduling systems
Systems should be built around your internal scheduling algorithms to ensure that changeovers are reduced, and schedule changes are uncommon, which unlocks greater productivity.
Leverage technology
Leverage Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Inventory, Project Management, and other software to connect your company, automate repetitive tasks, and digitally enhance your operations.
Identify your roadblocks
Taking a thoughtful approach to strategic planning will ensure success and scalability, while also unlocking increased revenue and EBITDA.
Maximize revenue
Identify the most important areas, and then invest in improving your processes, systems, and behaviours of your staff. Significant revenue increases can be supported without losing bottom-line EBITDA’s and without over-investment in human and machine capital.
How MNP can Help
Because of our practitioners who specialize in the industry, countless manufacturing businesses throughout Canada rely on MNP to improve their operations permanently. Take our Performance Improvement Health Check to see how your organization measures up against industry best practices — and uncover opportunities to grow, improve your client experience, and increase profitability.