Up time. Down time. Just in time. Lead time. Cycle time. Time to quote. Time to process. Wasted time. Time well spent. Time is everything in manufacturing.
Consider your past week. How much of this hot commodity did you and your team spend on tasks that did not drive value to the business?
Managing paperwork (quotes, packing lists, invoices, certs, etc.), collecting and documenting data, tracking parts and orders, and generating reports are non-value-adding tasks that have a direct hit on the bottom line. In the current economy and workforce realities, these tasks need to be digitized, automated, and optimized. This is no longer optional.
Hours of in-depth operational discussions and plant walks of 150+ plants in powder coating, anodizing, heat treating, e-coating, plating, and other finishing shops, have revealed startling numbers:
- On average, 3 hours are spent every day servicing customer calls and emails for order updates and information, lost documents, etc.
- From production and the front office teams, a collective average of 14 hours per day are spent physically tracking down parts
- Collectively, operators spend 3 hours per day finding information on how to process parts
- On average, manual data entry amounts to 8 hours daily for invoicing and another 4 hours daily for generating shipping documents
- Order entry is not streamlined and accounts for approximately 4 hours per day
- On average, estimating teams spend close to 3 hours daily deriving pricing and generating proposals. This is often senior leadership time and gets pushed to evenings and weekends.
- Schedulers typically spend 28 minutes prepping to schedule, 17 minutes to generate, and 15 minutes to distribute for a total of 1 hour daily. In large operations, this can be close to 2 hours per day.
The time to complete the tasks outlined above can be substantially improved through use of modern, industry-specific software. Your efforts here will put time back into the days of each and every employee – operators, admin, managers, and owners.
How Time Impacts Job Shop Operators
Operators see anywhere from 10-40 high-mix, high-quantity orders per day. Front-end scheduling and prioritization of work, sent to each operator’s personalized workboard, ensures there are no “What do I do now?” questions. Select information, including text, pictures, and video instruction, is available at their fingertips. This drives efficiency, increases throughput, and improves First Time Quality metrics.
How Time Impacts Job Shop Administrators
Front office staff often have stacks of paper waiting to be processed and piling up on their desks. Eliminate the budget for printer paper by emailing on-demand custom .pdfs for quotes, invoices, packing lists, POs, and certs. All data is automatically pulled from the database ensuring no manual entry errors and no leave of absence due to carpal tunnel syndrome. Any lost documents and order status updates can be quickly addressed via the Google-like global search capability.
How Time Impacts Job Shop Managers
Slash the cell phone bills for your plant managers, operations managers, and production managers by reducing the time spent communicating with customers. This is a two-fold improvement: Modern software allows for notifications and emails sent directly from the platform, and includes a customer portal, which reduces the quantity of calls. There is a significant reduction in time to address said calls as well because all information is 2-3 clicks away.
How time Impacts Job Shop Owners
Eliminate the late nights and weekends crunching numbers to derive your pricing and calculate margins. Automated data collection throughout the production process eliminates the burdensome task of gathering, organizing, and analyzing data. Unlimited, instantaneous, and non-canned reports can be built at your convenience to drive critical business decisions.
We often hear, “What will so and so do, with all of their time now?” There can even be some apprehension due to fear of eliminating positions. Change the mindset from replacement to repurpose and outline how the reallocation of time will positively impact the enterprise. Unlocking time for your team enables an opportunity for:
- Increased personal development and training
- Improved customer service, yielding happier customers
- Increased efficiency and throughput
- Happier, healthier (mentally and physically) employees
- Consistent focus on sales, marketing, and business strategy
There is low-hanging fruit everywhere for saving time and most often, these instances require no additional work nor huge alterations to existing practices and processes. Once these are tended to, champions focus on the “What now?” items that may require changes to practices/processes and even add time in specific areas of operation. But added time in these functions (i.e. part number information entry) yields significantly more ROI by enabling greater functionality including capacity planning, scheduling, robust operator instruction, and automated margin reports.
How can job shop owners, managers, administrators, and operators better manage their manufacturing plants? Take care of your team. Reward them, and motivate them to stay, with state-of-the-art technology. You will be a direct beneficiary of the time saved.
For more information about how to manufacture time with Steelhead Technologies, book at demo here.
About the Author
Chet Halonen is a Sales and Deployment Engineer at Steelhead Technologies. His experience, from technical roles at vehicle and large machinery OEMs and interpersonal roles in officiating and sales, allows him to personally connect with people from all backgrounds and efficiently work with them to identify where Steelhead will streamline their operations. Chet is passionate about getting our customers the actionable production data they need to maximize their profits. Connect with Chet on LinkedIn.