When it comes to improving manufacturing capacity planning, it’s always best to start with identifying and eliminating lost time. For the most part, manufacturers with issues in capacity planning often have issues with down time. The down time impacts machine utilization and results in higher costs and higher cycle times. However, the causes of downtime can be eradicated if, and only if, the manufacturer takes the time to track the root causes of that down time. To this extent, one of the most surprising causes of down time in manufacturing is the incidence of poorly constructed bill of materials and assembly drawings.
In fact, it’s much more prevalent that most people think. While it might come as a surprise, I’ve come across this often enough to considered improper bill of materials and assembly drawings to be among the most damaging, and indeed costly, causes of down time in manufacturing. Why does this happen?
Simple Causes of Work Stoppages
No company wants to intentionally cause down time, but that’s exactly what they do when they allow inadequate bill of materials and unclear assembly drawings to hit the production floor. Again, the question is often how and why this happens? Well, for the most part it happens because companies ignore its severity and frequency. In fact, most companies simply assume that a couple of seconds here and there doesn’t really amount to much lost time.
As a result, the damaging effects of poor bill of materials instructions, and unclear assembly drawings, are far too often ignored. That is of course until someone takes the time to dollarize the impact of this lost time. Once that’s done, most manufacturers take immediate action. So, what are some of the more common reasons why manufacturers don’t take the time to address these causes of down time?
1. Redundant Parts
In some cases, companies may be manufacturing a “one-off” or “custom-made” product where the likelihood of them manufacturing the same product again is considerably low. The reasoning then becomes, “Why take the time to address these problems if we’ll never make this same product again?”
Unfortunately, companies that make custom parts, make a lot of them and therefore have a lot of new production packages, with a lot of flaws, hitting the production floor. In some cases those products become extremely popular and the company ends up manufacturing more than they anticipated. Having never changed the drawing means the company will continue to produce one flawed production package after another with unclear bill of materials and confusing assembly drawing.
2. Lack of Time Needed for Substructure Analysis
One of the reasons for poor bill of material & assembly drawing practices is because of a manufacturer’s concern of the time needed to correct the errors through a sub-assembly or substructure analysis. What they lack is the foresight to see just how damaging this particular cause of down time is. However, the only way that can happen is to physically follow that production package through manufacturing and document the lost time as it occurs.
This needs to be done in each and every work station on the production floor. So, while some manufacturers rationalize that they don’t have the time to fix these problems, they in essence ignore the time it costs them not to fix them!
The above substructure analysis is taken from the post: Bill of Materials Essentials: Substructure & Subassembly Analysis
3. Lack of Visibility
While each of the first two points is important, perhaps the biggest reason manufacturers ignore this issue is because they simply lack visibility. Those in production, including employees and production managers, know just how severe the problem is. However, for some reason, the further that information goes up the chain, the less important it becomes.
That is of course until someone comes in, tracks the incidence of lost time caused by poor assembly drawings and bill of materials, and applies a dollar value to these delays. As mentioned, once management sees the true costs of the down time, it isn’t long before they decide that the issue must be addressed.
The following video explains the important of having your production employees operate like surgeons.
When it comes to improving manufacturing capacity planning, take the time to first address the causes of lost time. Nothing is more detrimental to production planning, than to have a manufacturing process fraught with down time. This is especially true when the causes of the down time simply require minimal time to correct them. However, a number of companies ignore this issue entirely.
Instead of fixing the problem, they allow it to drive up their costs and impact their cycle times. Remember, there are some simple things that can dramatically reduce the incidence of work stoppages. Take the time to tackle these issues once and for all. It will make a huge difference.
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