04/01/2012 by Andrew Nicholson.

Just a quick note that the new national (UK) MAS website is at http://www.mymas.org/,

with a link to a new searchable Register of Consultants

http://www.masdirectory.org/mas/Manufacturer/index.php

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15/10/2011 by Andrew Nicholson.

14/10/11 Business Minister Mark Prisk announced details today of the new national MAS programme. Focusing on small and medium manufacturers who can innovate, grow and create high quality jobs, a range of support will be available, from free diagnostice reviews to company transformation programmes. The scheme will provide grant funding of up to £10,000 for eligible businesses.

http://nds.coi.gov.uk/content/Detail.aspx?ReleaseID=421601&NewsAreaID=2&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+bis-news+%28BIS+News%29

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15/10/2011 by Andrew Nicholson.

Let’s look at how we get more from our people - labour productivity. The first step is to apply Lean to eliminate or reduce all of the non-value-added activities that waste people’s time and effort.

Then we need to motivate and incentivise people to maximise their output.

We need to establish performance benchmarks. We do this by determining the rate at which a competent trained operator can perform a task, working at a level that they can maintain over a full working shift and a full working week.

In a future article my colleague Jeff Holt will be explaining this in more detail.

 Once we’ve established standard times for key operations we can measure actual performance against these.

The first step is to record the hours attended by each production worker over a given period (usually daily) and record the standard hours of work/product produced over the same period (often called the “Hours Recovered”). dividing the hours produced by the hours attneded gives a measure of performance. This can be analysed at various levels - by operator, by work centre, by department, and so on up to factory / plant level. Often, a reasonable target is to expect an overall level of performance for a team, cell or plant of about 75-80%.

Keeping a cumulative / Year to Date figure will tell you exactly what your true labour costs are. Just be careful when you’re calculating this - don’t try to average percentages (it doesn’t work!) but always divide the cumulative Hours Recovered by the cumulative Hours Attended.

A number of clients that we’ve worked with recently found that they appeared to be achieving performance levels around this figure. BUT - and it’s a massive BUT - the standard hours used in the factory weren’t the same as the hours used for costing / estimating / pricing!

 Sounds obvious but many manufacturers don’t have this properly nailed down.

It’s simple, really -

Make sure that you can cost / estimate labour hours sufficiently accurately. Build in the appropriate performance factor (eg 75%).

Set these times as targets for production staff so that they know what to aim for. Don’t fall for the trap of either not giving targets or of setting higher targets “so that they work harder”! (if you can’t work out why this is, you might just be in the wrong job).

MONITOR performance daily, provide feedback and take improvement action as required.

That way you can be confident that you’re in control of your labour costs, and that you can achieve the margins that you plan for.

If you’d like some simple free spreadsheets that you can use to perform these calculations, email me at andyfromnicholsons@gmail.com

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09/07/2011 by Andrew Nicholson.

In previous posts we’ve looked at the “technical” side of increasing output - the tools and techniques. Now let’s look at the “people” side of things - how to get more from employees.

Most of us want to know what’s expected of us, we like to have something to aim for and we like to feel we’re making progress towards a worthy goal.

Usually, it’s not difficult to provide all of those things in the workplace. But too many of us don’t. Here’s how:

1. Agree on two or three important objectives that are relevant to the work team - probably based around quality, productivity and service.
2. Find some simple ways to measure them.
3. Agree on regular targets - monthly, weekly, per shift, per hour.
4. Make sure they’re visible to everyone in the work area.
5. Display actual performance regularly and visually (electronic display or hand-written whiteboard).
6. Recognise good results immediately.
7. Train, help and encourage the team to solve any performance problems.
8. Find ways to recognise and reward those who contribute the most. Be creative!
9. Actively manage the performance of those who don’t contribute.
10. Lock in the improvements
11. Celebrate success
12. Keep at it!

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06/06/2011 by Andrew Nicholson.

I attended a great workshop session last week by EEF about the need to ensure that training is designed to produce measurable business benefits. Like all good learning activities it got me to thinking. Despite the economic downturn one question I’m rarely asked by clients is: “What tool is going to save me the most money most quickly?”

If you spend a significant amount of time on set-up’s and change-over’s the answer is very simple: SMED.

In my view SMED is one of the best Lean tools available, bar none!

 I had yet another perfect example of this a couple of weeks back, with an engineering client. They make small batches of tubular steel frames for OEM’s of chair and bath products. Inevitably, batch sizes are getting smaller, lead times are getting shorter and they’re needing to develop - and prototype - more and more new products. So set-up’s and changeover’s are becoming more and more of a problem. They knew they had to improve and they were keen to learn how. The answer proved very simple: SMED!

I spent some time with the production manager and team leader planning a half-day  SMED session.  

Two weeks later we got together the team who worked in the production cell and they spent about 40 minutes learning about SMED in a practical workshop session. As always, I told them: ”If you haven’t yet applied SMED then typically you can halve change-over times fairly easily”.

Then we had half an hour or so of prep. time to make sure we each knew exactly what we were going to do. We spent about half an hour video-recording an actual change-over then back to the training room. There we spent a further hour and a half analysing the video using a SMED spreadsheet, and brainstorming improvement ideas.

Result: the team immediately identified a series of low-cost / no-cost improvements. Some could be implemented immediately and others will take 3-4 weeks to complete fully. Reduction in change-over time: 52%.  

Much as I’d love to, I can’t run these on-site SMED sessions for everyone who needs them. So a while back we took all of our training materials and put them together into a simple trainng package. It’s got the analysis spreadsheet, a 2-page “how-to” guide and a short video animation with voice-over showing you step-by-step exactly how to do the analysis. And you can download the whole package from our website for only £16.95 (USD 29.50): SMED Training Package. And if you don’t find that that’s the best payback you’ve ever had for a training product I’ll give you a full refund!

Whether you use our help or not I urge all of you with significant set-up and change-over times to start using SMED as soon as you possibly can. It’s quick, simple and the payback is tremendous!

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17/05/2011 by Andrew Nicholson.

It’s easy to assume that a machine is a bottleneck simply because work stacks up behind it. It seems obvious - the machine cannot keep up with the required pace of production. So the Capital Expenditure request gets written or the owner gets his or her chequebook out, the new machine arrives and everyone’s happy. Everyone that is except all of the folk who had better things to spend the money on.

No-one wants to be the party pooper but here’s the Painful Truth: sometimes you don’t really need to spend all that money. In reality, the machine can often produce enough to keep up with customer demand.

In previous posts we’ve talked about Overall Equipment Effeciveness (OEE) as a great way to measure how much good quality output you’re getting from a particular machine or process. In fact we recommend that you consider measuring OEE regularly on all critical / bottleneck machines / processes.  But for the moment let’s just keep it simple and jump straight to some practical money-saving tips…

At this point if you’re well advanced with Lean and you’re regularly hitting OEE levels above 80% then you can stop reading now and instead go away and review progress against your policy deployment  goals. For the rest of us, read on for some practical money-saving tips…

Money-saving tip #1: measure how much of the available time the machine actually performs value-added work, i.e. producing output that the customer will pay for. You’ll be amazed! You spent all of that money and the **** machine is only working half of the time! Measure all of that lost time and what it’s spent on. Things like break-times, set-up’s and changeover’s, break-down’s, scrap and defects, running at lower speeds, not producing right first time, etc, etc, etc. Sounds familiar? Pick the biggest ones and get the team looking at ways of reducing them. Here are some examples…

Money-saving tip#2: look at staggered break-times, improved production scheduling, effective materials supply. In other words, make sure that you always keep the machine running and you always keep it fed with work. If this is a problem area for you, it’s time to learn about Drum-Buffer-Rope: aim to maintain a buffer of materials to feed the machine and feed it at the rate required to keep up with customer demoand (the “drum beat”).

Money-saving tip #3: if the machine needs a warm-up / start-up period, where possible make sure this happens before the start of the working shift. For example - if employees are on site and raring to go (*cough*) at 7.00 am, arrange for someone to come in earlier to warm up the machine. Same applies at the end of shift. 

Money-saving tip #4: if you’re losing too much time on set-up’s and changeover’s, you need to apply SMED. In my humble opinion SMED (”Single Minute Exchange of Dies”) gives the biggest, quickest payback of all of the Lean tools and techniques. It’s easy to learn, easy to do and often gives dramatic savings. The first time you apply SMED it’s common to halve the time taken, usually with little or no cost. Excuse the shameless plug here but you can download our SMED training package and learn how to do it in less than 20 minutes for less that £20 (less than $30).

Money-saving tip #5: crank it up! You’ll often hear lots of “reasons” why the machine can’t run at its full rated speed. “It keeps breaking down”, “Quality deteriorates”, “We can’t keep up”, etc, etc. Try it! Measure it! Often the anticipated problems are far less serious than expected. If you do get problems, you’ll then know exactly where you need to focus some improvement effort.

If you’ve already bought that new machine when you didn’t really need to, well at least you’ll know better next time. If you’re just about to buy it, then before you do have a look at these tips. They might just save you a fortune.

If you’ve any examples of your own please submit them here and I’ll post the best one’s (sorry about the delay for moderation but I’m afraid it’s the only way we can avoid being hijacked by spam).

In future posts we’ll be looking at yet more ways to increase factory output so watch this space - or better still, sign up to receive new posts automatically by email. Until next time - keep it Lean…….

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03/05/2011 by Andrew Nicholson.

Recent surveys of manufacturers confirm what we’re seeing at the moment - many are struggling to meet increasing orders. We’re being called in by more and more clients who simply can’t keep up! Sounds like a great problem to have you might say, but if you don’t take the right actions immediately to increase your manufacturing output you can find that you quickly run out of your customers, your cash and your sanity!

Time for some home truths.

Many manufacturers throw money and resources at the problem and end up killing their profits and running out of cash. We run a great factory simulation exercise - Factory of the Future - that illustrates this perfectly. Everyone’s working flat out but costs go up, quality goes down and delivery performance goes out of the window. Sounds crazy but those of you who’ve taken part will smile as you remember seeing it with your own eyes.

So how do you get it right?

Well, let’s not get into the finer points of Theory of Constraints at this point - let’s just keep it simple.

First of all we need to look at what’s holding us back. We need to identify our true bottlenecks. We all know that a bottleneck is that part of the process where the capacity / throughput is lower than anywhere else. But we often jump to conclusions about where the bottlenecks are, usually because we see lots of work building up behind them.

I’ve seen six-figure sums spent on increasing the capacity of “bottlenecks” that aren’t really bottlenecks at all so if you want to save your money - and perhaps your job - please read on…

I can’t emphasise this next point enough - WE MUST MEASURE THE TRUE THROUGHPUT at the activity / operation. Many times we find that we do in fact have sufficient capacity and that the problem is not one of capacity. 

The next step is to look at how much time is available at the activity / operation and how much of this time is given to useful productive work. Then we can look in detail at the non-productive time, find the root causes and tackle them. Often we find that these revolve around poor planning of labour or poor production scheduling.

In a future post we’ll look in more detail at next steps. In the meantime if you’d like to read up on bottleneck management you might enjoy the classic book “The Goal” by Goldratt, written in the form of a story rather than a textbook. If you’re a UK manufacturer and would like our help have a look at our website page on how to  increase factory output.

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07/04/2011 by Andrew Nicholson.

Our client is one of the UK’s leading instrument manufacturers, specialising in temperature, pressure and flow measurement. They’re looking for an effective and dynamic Production Planner to continually improve customer on-time delivery performance, whilst reducing lead-times and inventory levels. This challenging role involves managing customer expectations by translating their requirements into an achievable daily production schedule through actively managing materials and capacity availability. The successful candidate will be a key member of the Operations Team and will interface with all areas of the business.

Essential requirements include the following:

• HND / Degree in a relevant subject

• Production Planning & Scheduling

• MRP II

• Computer literate

• Able to communicate effectively at all levels

• Effective team player

Knowledge or experience of the following would be desirable:

• Sage “Line 500” ERP software package

• Lean Manufacturing Tools & Techniques

• Manufacturing to short lead times in a fast moving, small batch, manual assembly and test environment

• Instrumentation products & processes

“This is a newly created role and offers great opportunity to develop your skills with a company keen to invest in developing your career. We offer a competitive salary and benefits package…”

If you are interested in applying for this role please forward an outline of your background, qualifications and experience by email to Recruitment@ManufacturingTimes.co.uk. Please note that all emails will be forwarded automatically to our client - if there are any companies that you would not want to receive your details then please contact instead  Andrew Nicholson at an@nicholsonconsultancy.com. NO AGENCIES PLEASE.

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07/04/2011 by Andrew Nicholson.

Following the devastating impact of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, signs now of the inevitable knock-on effects on industrial output around the globe http://www.nebusiness.co.uk/business-news/latest-business-news//2011/04/07/nissan-suspends-production-in-wearside-61634-28477773/?campaign=Newcastle_email_breaking-business-news-email:20110407

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23/03/2011 by Andrew Nicholson.

Real help for hard-pressed manufacturers in Yorkshire and the Humber!   If you need to get real results quickly, immediately and at low cost – and who doesn’t these days - I’ve got some great news for you. 

From 1^st April 2011 we can offer MAS Support for short, sharp high-impact projects. This is probably the best value proposition you’re likely to see for a long while.  

Imagine what you could achieve with 3-10 days of on-site expertise completely focused on improving your business.  Imagine if you only had to pay 50% of the cost. 

You know how difficult it is to find time to tackle all of those projects on your list. Why? Because – as one of our clients put it “you have to do it on top of the day to day s***”.  I know – I’ve been there!  

These days though I can spend all of my day in your business doing nothing else but focusing on those projects. Take 10 minutes now to think about what you could get done, then give me a call. 

But don’t wait too long – MAS funds are limited and will be prioritised.  The first round of projects has already started!Don’t miss out on the best offer you’ll get this year – call me now on 07768 376 580 or email an@nicholsonconsultancy.com.

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