Christy Bella
For experienced business owners, discipline and control are qualities that are expected from their workplace. Of course, laying out your business on paper may not seem as complicated. But once your plans start to come into fruition, only then will you notice the finer details.
Whether your company is still looking for a firm footing in the local or global market or you’ve been noticing a steady decline in production, you should be aware that efficiency depends on your processes. Without them, your product line might be of poor quality, or the numbers fail to reach the desired quota.
Without showing discipline and control, you might neglect to accommodate what your employees need, in return, affecting the product line. Fortunately, you have experts like Lean Consultants in Europe or other locations (depending on where you’re based) that can advise you. Through them, you may learn that one of the aspects you must prioritize is improving the factory layout.
The following are key tips you can follow in optimizing the factory layout of your manufacturing company in a bid to make your business more productive.
How To Optimize Factory Layout For Increased Productivity?
1. Examine Current Workflow
Although putting your plan on paper offers an excellent overview of your business, it remains limited to just that: an overview. While you have the rough estimates for how many workers can create a certain number of products, there are still factors that can affect their performance, such as:
- Work conditions
- Product management
- Inexperienced workers
- Malfunctioning equipment
If you’ve noticed a drop in numbers, learn to accept the responsibility that you must’ve had a part in whatever problem’s going on. Once you do that, only then can you pinpoint where the weak link is within your business.
2. Communicate With Employees
Of course, experiencing a severe mental toll at work is likely to happen, especially if problems within the workplace aren’t brought up. Unfulfillment is one issue that tends to get overlooked because it’s a problem affecting oneself instead of the majority. However, little did you know that the current factory layout might be involved in issues like this, ergo, resulting in more long-term problems.
Yet if anyone can help you identify any problems, your employees themselves can give you feedback. You need to know immediately whether it’s a concern about having too little space with too many employees or how some materials may be hazardous when in contact.
On the other hand, despite only providing concerns or suggestions, you should still give them the same level of attention as if you’re handling a dire emergency like those sample situations from earlier. Since your employees have more experience on the floor than anyone else, listening to their side may help you produce solutions that result in great employee benefits.
This way—be it interns or experienced workers that contribute more regarding productivity—you can indirectly let them know that their opinions matter in your business’s road to improvement.
While feedback is essential, it’d be just as beneficial if newly hired workers were trained before diving into the meat of the production; the same goes for old employees. After all, once you’ve made significant changes to the factory layout, it’ll take some time to get used to them. Through training, your employees will know how to work their way around the workplace and take their productivity to the next level.
3. Turn To Automation
Many small businesses already consider automation as the path to the future. Because using it is much more efficient, it can also help you identify the problem yourself after a few clicks after choosing a smart automating software. Furthermore, having machinery handle most of your productivity will lessen any possibility of you dealing with the consequences brought by human error.
Adding onto that, because there are lesser employees doing manual labour, you don’t have to worry about your work being cramped when machines have already taken their place. This way, instead of having ten workers complete an equal amount of products, even only having one device can already accomplish as much as they did.
4. Practice Maintenance
Although using machinery and automation to run your business from now on might be efficient, it does come with its own flaws. Since you’re dependent on these machines, you might wear them out after using them day after day. Once that happens, your business could plummet straight into bankruptcy without your devices creating products and you needing the funds to repair all of them.
So, to avoid those, have professionals do a regular check-up on your machines. This way, you can keep up with their condition and replace a potential problem ahead of time. Doing so reduces the possibility of anything critical that might be detrimental to your business.
Takeaway
Although you’ve already planned out everything necessary to start your business, productivity is one aspect that can be erratic, especially at the beginning. Nevertheless, no business owner started perfectly. Therefore, to kickstart your business in the right direction, you should prioritize increasing your productivity right off the bat.
