At a time when costs are skyrocketing for raw material, driving up manufacturing costs and passing them on to the consumer, the strategies your business implements to reduce waste and streamline processes can make all the difference in your bottom line.
Rising costs are streaming in from all directions from the gas pump, tariffs, labor costs, services, insurance, and materials. Even when you identify sources of waste in one area, rising costs in another can neutralize your efforts. Working with a professional quality manufacturing software can help trim costs in different areas of your business and shine light on possible bottlenecks, waste, theft, and less profitable products. Your ability to deep dive into product performance will allow you to make informed decisions about production processes, where to direct spending or perhaps where you need to hire more help.
Your business shouldn’t be running short on supply of materials you use to manufacture your best-selling products. Yes, supply chain disruptions crop up and they have been doing so more often of late; however, if you had a process in place to automatically place reorders every time material levels dipped to minimum amounts, you wouldn’t be caught by surprise.
Having production come to a standstill is a recipe for disaster. If you’re not producing, you’re paying people to standstill (if not laying them off) and you’re missing out on sales. If you can’t deliver on-time to your customers or minimally communicate updates about delivery, you will lose trust and customers will find someone else.
Streamlining and Trimming Waste
The only way to navigate through these challenges to emerge victoriously on the other side of the upheaval is to evaluate each workflow to identify where changes can be made to speed things up, remove obstacles and eliminate waste.
Using product reports, management can usually identify time frames when products performed worse than others. That is a starting point to assess whether the problem stems from the supplier or changes in the workflow processes.
- Have lead times changed?
- Is your supplier communicating issues with you?
- Have more workers been out sick?
- Does any machinery need repair?
- Could the floor space be used more efficiently to cut down time between workflow stages?
These are some of the things you can review, but a discussion with the floor managers can also shed light on any problems they are facing. They may have suggestions for improvements that are not obvious when looking at a report.
Some industries have invested in new technology to automate redundant processes with machines. Someone must still be responsible for programming and overseeing the performance of AI technology; small to medium size businesses are less likely to take on these expensive technologies because the upfront investment is more than they can handle. Many large corporations have been implementing AI technology for some time now.
In light of the difficulties many of the smaller businesses are facing, some relief from the government would go a long way, not only in the form of tax relief but an easing of some of the less crucial regulations would facilitate recovery.
