Our Critical Chain Production Management approach focuses on increasing the throughput of your manufacturing system. Throughput has a far greater impact on your bottom line and your cash flow than cost cutting. As a bonus, your costs will decrease because there is less waste and shorter lead-times, making your company more competitive, more dependable, and stronger. You have better control, and therefore you and your customers have greater satisfaction.
Until you experience it, imagining how much untapped capacity exists in your manufacturing operations is difficult. To find this capacity, all you need to do is change the way you manage. This sounds simple, and it is. However, it’s not easy. Change rarely is. With the proper guidance, the vast improvements will emerge smoothly and far faster than you might expect.
Your processes and resources do not change. Stress goes down. Performance improvements go directly to the bottom line.
Other typical results are:
- Reduced inventories and manufacturing lead times
- Increased productivity
- Throughput
- Superb on-time delivery
Constraints Management companies consistently out-perform conventional, world-class companies using well known best practices.
Focus on Flow
Breakthroughs come from areas most people are simply are not aware of. Instead of seeing machines, people, processes and orders, look at the shop as a system, with a flow of work. Identify what is slowing the flow of work from getting through to the customer. There is usually one thing that most limits the flow. It’s called a bottleneck, the system constraint. It is the most heavily loaded resource. The constraint is like the weakest link in a chain. The weakest link determines a chain’s strength. Similarly, the most heavily loaded resource determines the limit of a shop’s output.
The constraint can be a person, a work cell or a department. Fortunately, there will always be a constraint in a system since it is necessary and extremely valuable. It determines the system output and it’s the first place to make improvements to increase throughput because the results are immediate. (Fixing any other area usually has no effect on output.)
Managing Flow
The constraint is also useful as a critical control point for management. Rather than watching all of the parts of the system, just watch the constraint to know how the system is performing.
Nothing should get in the way of the constraint, wasting its time, or starving it. The rest of the system must support getting the most through the constraint. Protect the constraint. Keep it producing. It’s the heartbeat of the shop. If the constraint stops, throughput is lost, and throughput is how fast the shop is making money.
Contact us to learn more about our Manufacturing Management services.
