If your company uses lean manufacturing software, then you know how important this system is to the efficient functioning of your factory. These software programs can make recommendations for everything from scheduling production runs to scheduling maintenance, but it’s important to realize that the recommendations they give are only as useful as the data they’re using.
By giving these programs a history of your facility’s production it’s possible for these software programs to anticipate the most efficient way to make the items needed for current orders. For example, it’s a common practice for a factory to wait until several orders for the same product come in before setting up and running a production line for that product. While this cuts down on set-up time and labor costs, it has the side effect of making customers unhappy as they wait too long for their product. To prevent this, many factories decide to run a line “early” and to “make extra” in order to keep an important customer happy or to keep efficiencies high, resulting in set-up costs that are too high and wasted time, and/or additional product that takes up shelf space until an order is received.
The trick to getting the software to do this, however, is that it needs good data. If your company doesn’t keep track of set-up time, for example, or simply assumes that set-up is the same for every product, the software will be unable to take the variable time into account when generating a schedule. By leaving this data out, the program might compute that switching between dozens of different products a day is the best way to fill orders. This might not be smart in the real world. Also, telling the software what your people can actually do in detail enables the program to compute a schedule that minimizes the unproductive down time of the production line while maximizing the labor from your employees while avoiding unnecessary build-up of inventory. This all contributes to running a leaner operation.
Lean manufacturing software can only be as “lean” as the data you feed it. When setup times, changeovers, and real labor costs aren’t captured accurately, the system ends up scheduling based on guesses—and you end up with frustrated customers, excess inventory, and more firefighting on the shop floor.
Our infographic, “The Money Is in the Planning,” shows the hidden ways manual, spreadsheet-based planning quietly eats into margin and growth—even at factories that think they’re running lean. You’ll see how poor planning leads to:
If you’re working on improving data collection and lean practices, this is a quick visual way to spark internal conversations about where planning needs to improve next.