Optimizing Factory Efficiency: A balance of several production variables
In the dynamic landscape of manufacturing, optimizing factory efficiency involves a balance of several production variables.
Explore how our customers navigate these complexities, addressing key factors like Availability, Quality, and Performance – Every detail matters.
At Graniten, we understand the challenges our customers face – the need to produce more within a limited space, while cutting costs.
Explore this new blog where our production specialists, Anders Wilhelmsson and Kevin Braeckmans dive into the World of Lean Manufacturing and Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE).
Lean manufacturing & OEE
Firstly, to optimize your factory efficiency, Lean Manufacturing is an important focus. This methodology can help streamline and improve manufacturing processes to provide enhanced benefits for customers, while saving time and money by eliminating waste.
Another key standard used in the industry for measuring manufacturing productivity is OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness). In short OEE identifies the percentage of manufacturing time that is truly productive. An OEE score of 100% means you are manufacturing only Good Parts, as fast as possible, with no Stop Time.
- Quality 100% = no defect parts are produced
- Performance 100% = as fast as the process was built for
- Availability 100% = full uptime during planned production
Dynamic partnership
So how do these 2 go together?
To sum up, the simple answer is that together, they form a dynamic partnership. While Lean Manufacturing principles seek to eliminate waste and optimize overall production systems, OEE monitoring provides a way to locate and address specific sources of inefficiency within these systems.
In other words, Lean Manufacturing can help improve your OEE score. Many manufacturing lines are only 60% productive, meaning there are tremendous opportunities for improvement. By implementing lean manufacturing principles, companies can improve their OEE score by reducing downtime, improving quality, and increasing production speed.
Know your biggest pain points
Basically, optimizing factory efficiency, means balancing all variables you have at your disposal within your production environment. This is where our expertise comes in. We know lean manufacturing and know our customers biggest pain points.
To demonstrate, below examples cover some of the variables our customers in the pharma industry needs to consider:
- Quality – What is produced needs to be good enough for the customer, and in the right quantities.
- A reject or faulty product is a loss of production time and a potential loss in material.
- Overprocessing does not add any value for the customer but uses production resources regardless.
- Performance – Have your production lines produce at their full capability.
- Operators or machines that need to wait on up- or downstream steps, slow down.
- Badly maintained equipment will not be able to run at full capacity.
- Variation in material consistency of processed goods can cause fluctuations in the delivered output.
- Availability – Micro stops count and must be treated as a loss. Production equipment or lines need to run to produce output.
- The right skilled operators need to be available to run equipment and production lines.
- The machines or production equipment need to be in a working state.
- Changeovers in between batches should be fast and require minimum manpower.
Conclusion
In summary, it comes down to mapping your different variables, brainstorming on potential actions to improve the variables performance, and seeing which actions could deliver the best short- and long-term results.
At Graniten we understand this challenge and are always open to support our customers.
So take the opportunity to start the dialog with our production specialists Anders and Kevin, who possess extensive experience in Lean Manufacturing to discuss your production and the possible improvement points. Fresh eyes can make a difference, whether related to our machines or not, their new perspectives can make a significant impact to your factory efficiency.
Contact us directly at anders.wilhelmsson@graniten.com and kevin.braeckmans@graniten.com or fill in the contact form below!
We look forward to talk to you!
Anders Wilhelmsson
Key Account Manager
Kevin Braeckmans
Pharma Process Engineer
