Is adherence to discrete industrial production objectives really possible?
10/03/2023
Reading time: 5 min
Discrete industrial production is simply the process of manufacturing distinct products. The final products are easily identifiable and greatly differ from process manufacturing, where products are undifferentiated like, for example, oil, natural gas, or even salt.
Products manufactured in discrete production can be counted, sorted, and especially tracked individually, and include, for example, vehicles, furniture, toys, smartphones, or even airplanes. 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, allowing them to maintain high quality standards, maximize their productivity, and minimize costs.
Indeed, rigorous adherence to objectives ensures that manufactured products meet the required quality standards and prevents any delivery delays, which of course improves customer satisfaction and strengthens the company’s image.
Moreover, it can also enhance 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.
Therefore, adherence to discrete production objectives is a crucial issue for overall performance and profitability at all levels, but is it really possible to achieve?
The key factors for adherence to discrete industrial production goals
Production objectives: They must be precise and above all realistic. To do this, it will be necessary to take into account all the resources but also study the data accumulated over the previous years to establish probabilities regarding the different types of unforeseen events (breakdowns, absences, etc.).
The production plan: Evaluate the workload, determine capacities, take into account time and budget constraints and ensure that the plan is feasible and flexible enough to be modified in case of unforeseen events.
The supply chain: Also ensure that each step of the production chain is capable of meeting the production needs.
Motivated and well-trained employees: Employees must obviously be competent and trained to perform production tasks effectively and in accordance with production objectives, but also motivated and listened to, which will have a positive impact on absenteeism.
Machines, equipment, and software: Businesses must have the necessary tools and technologies to support production, such as machines and production management software, for example.
Strict quality standards: Quality standards must be defined clearly and rigorously to ensure that products meet the required specifications.
Problem-solving and unforeseen events: It is the anticipation and responsiveness of teams as well as the implementation of effective solutions that will often make the difference against unavoidable unforeseen events.
Strategies to improve adherence to discrete production goals
Rigorous planning and risk management
It is the nerve of war, yet even today many industrial sites work with tools that do not allow for load capacity simulations, and do not allow for real-time data reporting to enable true monitoring. The weekly update of the Excel file, for example, then becomes a key moment of the week.
Moreover, assuming a planner has the time to update an Excel file, the more human intervention there is in the calculation process, the higher the risk of error inevitably increases.
This is why several manufacturers today turn to solutions and software that offer all these possibilities and enable effective reactions and actions in the face of unforeseen events.
Indeed, a 4.0 planning must absolutely take into account the likely evolution of loads and capacities, and must also be able to face unforeseen events by allowing for real-time data updates and enabling quick initiation of new simulations.
Monitoring and measuring production performance
Monitoring the performance of your production allows you to decide when and where to apply corrective measures to adjust processes in case of drift from the objectives.
This is a monitoring process and also a fine analysis of your KPIs that will enable you to make continuous improvement decisions (improvement of ranges, reduction of lead-time, work-in-progress…).
The use of real-time monitoring and measurement tools is essential to increase your production rate or service rate. Once again, while an Excel spreadsheet may suffice, its lack of accuracy and regular updates could lead you to erroneous conclusions.
To monitor your KPIs in real-time, today there are solutions like Oplit that allow tracking the progress rate of a site at all levels, and also enable a group to obtain a multi-site view that facilitates inter-site competitiveness comparison based 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 innovations as blessings, valuable aids in their daily tasks, but it is also not uncommon for some profiles to initially reject these changes for fear of seeing their job distorted or even threatened.
The training should then focus on the purely technical aspect, but also on change management. Reassuring your employees and demonstrating to them that technology will give them time that they can allocate to higher value-added tasks will not be superfluous.
The goal will be to keep your employees motivated and fulfilled in order to get the best out of each of them.
The advantages of adhering to discrete production goals
There are several advantages to adhering closely to production goals, including:
An improvement in quality and brand image: By adhering to discreet production goals, companies can enhance the quality of their products. This can lead to increased customer satisfaction, reduced returns, and an improved reputation for the company.
Increased productivity: By following clear and precise production goals, companies can enhance their productivity by reducing downtime, production delays, and production errors. This can also result in increased output and improved profitability for the company.
A reduction in costs: Adhering to discreet production goals 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 goals, companies can better plan their production and related operations. This can help avoid production delays and improve inventory management.
Satisfied and motivated employees: The main engine of the virtuous circle of adherence to production goals!
So ultimately, is adherence to discrete industrial production objectives really possible?
At the risk of stating the obvious, as the unexpected is by definition difficult to foresee, it will always be complicated to adhere 100% to production objectives, no matter how relevant they may be.
However, the emergence of technological solutions offers companies the opportunity to integrate margins of error and to anticipate and better manage the unexpected.
And it is this capacity for granular management that will help industrial groups increase their adherence rate.
Not to mention the human resources, the brains, and the energy behind the tools.
