For small manufacturers that don’t have the luxury of having an MRP manufacturing software package, don’t despair! While a little more laborious, small manufacturers can track their previous day’s production levels via an excel sheet. Granted, it isn’t live, and is only updated when someone takes the time to update it, but it can work. It just requires you figure out your ideal production volumes and then track your actual production volumes daily. Therefore, I’ve decided to include a production tracking excel sheet with tables for small manufacturers.
Focusing on Productivity Rates
First, before venturing into how this production tracking excel sheet is set up, it’s important to establish your company’s productivity levels & productivity rate, or better put, the production volumes your company should produce without any downtime. Now, I know that downtime is part of manufacturing – it happens and it’s extremely difficult to eliminate all downtime.
Identifying the root causes of downtime, and putting plans in motion to eliminate that downtime, is essential to reducing manufacturing cycle times and increasing production throughput. The approach is to first determine your ideal production volumes, and then track your company’s actual daily production volumes. This will allow you to compare the variances.
The excel sample sheet will track your daily production volumes, or throughput, relative to your daily production goals. Next, a percentage of attained goal is added with a trend line for the entire week. This is an ideal graph to showcase within the production area as a summary of the prior week's production volumes. You can input whatever daily production goal objectives you have and the actual volumes and the excel sheet will take care of the rest.
The above video is taken from the post: Manufacturing Work Cell Optimization: Design, Layout and Analysis
For this to be successful means your company must first determine your productivity rate and use that to determine how much your company can produce in a given day without any downtime. Therefore, I strongly suggest you read the following posts before moving forward with this excel sheet.
The first one listed provides another sample excel sheet to track cycle time variances in individual work cells. The second and third focus on analyzing cycle times and setting up better work cells in order to increase the productivity rate emerging from these cells.
1) Cycle Time Tracking & Variance Analysis in Excel for Small Manufacturers
2) Do You Know How to Determine Your Manufacturing Productivity Rate?
3) Essential Cycle Time Analysis: Costs of Manufacturing Lost Time
As for the excel sheet itself, it couldn’t be any more straightforward. There are essentially two portions to the sheet. The first focuses on tracking your production goals versus actual production throughput throughput the week. The second tracks your monthly goals versus production throughput. All you need to do is occupy the blue highlighted portions of the tables entitled "production goals" and "actual throughput".
Now, this is merely a tool to visualize how your company tracks its daily and yearly production throughput. However, this simple tool only works if your company first determines its ideal productivity rate – or the amount your company should manufacture within a day with no downtime.
Once you’ve determined these levels, it’s much easier to track production against those levels. However, if you’ve already determined your ideal production volumes, then this excel sheet should help in tracking production within a week, month and year. Here’s the production sheet: Download Production Tracking Excel Sheet With Tables for Small Manufacturers
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