How to Boost Your Plant Production in a Short Amount of Time

What is the ideal organisational goal for a firm to gain momentum in a competitive industry? Or how to maximise production with the fewest resources? Yes, by increasing production efficiency.

While production efficiency seemed impossible to many, epoch-making innovations can help your organisation. Businesses must recognise efficient plant maintenance or technology. You drop the ball if you fail to adopt an appropriate strategy for your production plant. You can grow output, reduce costs, or improve industrial maintenance with the right tools.

Despite hiring experts, you may only reach an efficiency level that is within the budget. The possible reasons behind the failure could be many. So, finding out the ineffective RCFA or failure root cause analysis and production maintenance first would be the best approach. Suppose you need help boosting your plan production even with utilising maximum resources. In that case, you must read the entire article to get wind of several strategies we have tailored for you.

This article will teach you practical and resourceful ideas for boosting plant output. You will also learn about maintenance management that can raise your business's value.

The Importance of Maintenance Management in Production Efficiency

Maintenance management controls, schedules, and plans for Manufacturing equipment and tools. Manufacturing plant maintenance includes repair, replacement, and related tasks.

Failure to fund maintenance management can lead to equipment breakdown, reducing business productivity. What you should do for the maintenance management of your production plant is given as follows -

• Scheduling and planning for testing the workability of each machinery and tool.
• Enlisting potential problems that can lead to an unanticipated breakdown.
• Planning and scheduling maintenance downtime and eliminating them.
• Setting time for preventive maintenance. For example - you can fix a time like 3 or 6 months to change oil or other energy products.
• Monitoring the performance of the production machinery in real-time and conducting servicing.
• Applying usage-based plant maintenance. This industrial maintenance approach predicts the schedule. The schedule implies when your tools need servicing and forecasts the equipment usage volume.

You can apply reactive maintenance if any plans do not align with your resource or business size. Reactive maintenance is particular to small and medium businesses.

Reactive maintenance allows you to wait until your equipment breaks down. This maintenance has a few drawbacks. The drawbacks include costing more time and money to fix the sudden breakdown.

How Will You Increase Your Plant Production?

1. Planning and Scheduling for Inspecting the Machinery

You don't comprehend the value of frequent equipment inspection until a malfunction causes money loss. Manufacturing firms fix the root reasons before it affects the whole plant. You can save time and money by improving troubleshooting for Root cause analysis (RCA).

RCA is a prime element of six sigma, a process to develop the efficiency of machinery. Using RCA allows you to mitigate waste and delays in operation.

Different organisations make distinctive root cause analyses according to their requirements. The standard practice of RCA for a manufacturing machine includes - 

• Separating the tools and equipment suspected or defective parts to inspect their functionality.
• Applying one of the methods, such as the fishbone diagram or basic method. RCA plans describe solutions for troublesome issues based on precise data on suspicious tool parts. This will help you establish the defect's cause and solutions.

Moreover, RCA also eliminates inventory redundancy, leading to decreased production costs. Some of the benefits of root causes include :

Convenience

RCA enables automation in production, making it streamlined. You can dissect the safety hazard of your production and repair the issues. You can spot flaws before they affect quality. You can use this approach to foresee and prevent production issues. The method works even with budget restraints.

Increased profit

Your facilities can be efficient if you detect safety hazards, downtime, and maintenance. This directly contributes to a higher revenue margin.

Realistic solution

It allows for designing a straightforward step-by-step approach to detect and fix manufacturing issues. So you don't need different production solutions. You have to apply a developed formula repeatedly to resolve different cases.

2. Reliability Assessment of the Production Plant

Reliability assessment evaluates the performance of production tools and machinery. Equipment reliability means -

• It can be a tool or machinery working smoothly for a specific time.
• The equipment must perform per your expectation.
• The working period for a particular duration and maintaining its performance.
• The equipment will continue performing accordingly until the projected time expires.

The methods for measuring the reliability of the production plant are as follows- 

Mean time to repair (MTTR):

MTTR assesses the performance in restoring or retaining resources to a particular condition. For instance – During industrial maintenance, you evaluated a standard air conditioning unit. The air conditioning unit operated for 3600 hours in a department over the past two years.

During this time, the system failed six times. So the time required for repairing the system for the entire period will be 60 minutes - the formula of MTTR =Total usage hours divided by hours spent on repairs.

Mean time between failure (MTBF):

MTBF  determines the time a system fails to operate within a specific time. For instance, an air conditioner unit worked for 3600 hours. The duration was over two years, and it experienced 12 failures. The MTBF will be (3600/12) 300 operating hours.

Availability:

Availability defines equipment's capacity to operate in a particular situation per expectation. Simply put, this approach measures whether your machinery works as you want.

So think fast and start relying on any of the critical reliability models. It will improve the facility and cut down extra costs for unexpected repairs.

3. Implementing Preventive Maintenance

Preventive maintenance is the functional method to forecast and prevent unexpected equipment failure. You can handle preventive maintenance at a reasonable expense.

Preventative measures can be handled by conducting routine inspections and servicing. Moreover, the process comprises repairing your machinery items. The following list highlights activities that can show successful preventative maintenance - 

• Establishing a schedule for implementing routine inspection on tools and equipment.
• Cleaning entire manufacturing plans, building grounds, and other equipment regularly.
• Applying lubricate on the machinery parts enables motion to mitigate breakdown.
• Repairing and replacing the equipment which is defective or suspected to have defects.

Adjusting controls for expected performance and power efficiency.

When you devote yourself to managing preventive maintenance, you accomplish goals like

• Increasing the longevity and productivity of your equipment,
• Safeguarding talented workers from any imminent harm.

So preventing unanticipated catastrophes is preferable to reacting to them.

4. Installing a Conveyor System

Your facility can produce output quickly and accurately with an automated conveyor system. The conveyor system promotes production efficiency that adds value to your organisation.

Suppose you are still relying on traditional moving materials that use manual labour. You should drop that off immediately as it wastes your resources, time, and workers' energy. Thus, prepare to set up a conveyor system to recede wages and increase productivity.

5. Adopting Modern Technology

Technology is the gateway to achieving production efficiency and boosting output. If your business doesn't use advanced technologies, you should restructure.

• First, observe the current technology and implement new to meet your business strategy.
• It can start with using cloud computing to share data with related people. Again you must place money to install automated machinery.
• The changes brought into your organisation must fit your vision of production efficiency.
• You must incorporate system software for plant maintenance. The use of advanced software can store real-time data. The system will detect discrepancies and find solutions without human intervention.

Sometimes people fail to recognise the actual problem in their existing manufacturing plant. They adopt expensive technology that barely helps them. Therefore you must consider your company's resources, financial condition, and organisation size.

6. Improving Communication With Related Actors

You must have better communication with production line staff to boost efficiency. Effective communication helps employees to share data and provide comments, fostering direct cooperation.

Transmit production line staff estimates, preventive measures, and plant development info. If you have distorted communication, you can't expect employee efficiency.

7. Managing Training and Development Programs for Employees

Employee knowledge and skills affect production efficiency. No current maintenance, equipment reliability, or scheduling and planning information can harm output.

The output might be damaged by outdated maintenance, reliability, or scheduling. Outline a practical training and development program to boost manufacturing efficiency. 

Conclusion

You don't need to invest a lot or use many resources to boost plant output. You just need to handle your maintenance crew and resources carefully. Preventive maintenance can reduce breakdowns and boost production with minimum expenditures.

Meanwhile, it would help if you found out the area that needs advanced technical support. The rule of thumb is to train and enable the staff in the product line to cope with the changes in the facility.