It is a frequently cited management truism that “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” From the earliest days of the quality movement within manufacturing, from Taylor to Ford, or Deming and Shingo, and on to Womack and Jones – the simple premise of “measuring everything” has been at the root of continuous improvement. Without a vehicle for enabling Shop Floor Data Capture, however, the amount of labour expended in any manufacturing process is either subjectively measured or likely to experience wide variation and anomalous data.
If you are trying to implement a formal Lean or Six Sigma program in your organization, it is vital to have accurate data captured from the manufacturing process. While invoicing and purchase orders can lay the data trail for analysing your component inventory costs, the product costs associated with labour must also be collected. Additionally, the cycle time for each process must be captured in order to identify the areas where operators are struggling to sustain optimal throughput. The greater the amount of detail you can capture on your operators’ and assemblers’ processes, the greater your ability will be to understand the sources of variation and to identify the necessary countermeasures for bringing those processes back into control.
Even if you have not yet implemented a Lean or Six Sigma initiative and are simply looking to shorten cycles, reduce waste and identify bottlenecks you still need to have a data collection system to make achieving these goals possible. Experience and intuition are invaluable in understanding the dynamics of the shop floor environment. Measuring the intensity and duration of individual work, however, can validate those assumptions with mathematical accuracy or reveal some unseen problems not uncovered through qualitative management techniques.
At Elf Productivity Ltd, we have experience working with organizations in need of elevating their shop floor data capture programs. By implementing software solutions that allow for time tracking, as well as attendance reporting, access control and other Human Resources functions we enable data collection efforts that permit the analyses necessary for optimizing your business.
Reach out and contact us if you’d like to learn more about our Management Software products and how they can facilitate the improvement of your shop floor processes.