Your production floor is your business’s beating heart. It pumps blood around the entire organisation by helping you produce products to sell to customers. Just like a normal heart, you need to keep this beating healthily without slowing down. Unfortunately, production floors are prone to disruptions that cause your entire operations to shut down until these disruptions have been fixed.
Realistically speaking, you can’t afford to keep fixing disruptions – instead, you need to prevent them from happening. To do this you must understand the biggest causes of these problems on your production floor, which you can usually narrow down to these three things:
Faulty Machinery
Most of the issues on a production floor stem from faulty machinery. Something small within the machine may break and cause the entire thing to either shut down or work incorrectly. When that happens, you’ve got no way of producing whatever it is you’re making.
Preventing faulty machinery is a two-step task. Step one: invest in quality machines that are built to last and can handle your level of production. Step two: invest in regular maintenance for your machines. You’ll be surprised how many faults stem from broken bearing balls or other tiny elements that you’d never see from the outside. Maintenance stops this from happening and decreases your disruption rate.
Human Error
You hate to admit it, but human error can be a costly cause of disruptions on your production floor. All it takes is for one staff member to press the wrong button or move something slightly out of place on the production line. Suddenly, everything shuts down or you produce things with numerous faults.
How do you reduce human error on a production floor? It’s not the most favourable of suggestions, but perhaps you should reduce how many human staff members are allowed on the floor at any given time. Rely on automated manufacturing processes to cut out common and daily errors.
It could be the best way to optimise business outcomes – or you could train your staff to understand the production process better. Extensive training always helps, though you can’t deny that having fewer human employees will naturally lower the human error rate.
Unclean Surfaces
When we talk about unclean surfaces, we’re talking about anything on your production floor that’s dirty, dusty, grimy, etc. This could involve the flooring itself – wet or slippery floors can lead to people falling over and possibly crashing into machines or dropping items that were just made.
Dusty machinery also causes faults, which puts you in the position we touched on earlier. It shows the need to keep your production floor as clean as possible – you may need to invest in a full-time cleaning team to do this.
The most essential thing to take away from this post is the importance of reducing disruptions on your production floor. When your production floor has to shut down or temporarily pause, you’re losing opportunities to make products. This can make it harder for you to meet your numbers for certain orders, leading to unhappy customers, etc. A massive knock-on effect ensues – so keep an eye out for the leading causes of production floor disruptions and how to prevent them.
