How to Increase Productivity in Manufacturing With the Right Strategy

Improving Your Productivity With the Right Strategic Approach

Knowing how to improve manufacturing efficiency starts with identifying what’s not currently working as well as it could. Whether you’re using insights and data to pinpoint productivity drops or gaps in efficiency, or simply doing a manual inspection, it pays to know where you need to improve. 

Of course, this is easier said than done. Whether you need to adapt your approach to maintenance and repairs, or want to know where you’re losing time on a production line, it can be hard to spot inefficiencies in your own operation. 

That’s why external help can be hugely beneficial. Someone with vast experience and knowledge, coupled with an outside view of your operations, can often help you spot inefficiencies and define areas for improvement more easily than those already heavily involved day-to-day.

At Henkel, we offer on-site visits for this very reason. Our experts can analyze your current manufacturing processes to identify ways you could save time and money. 

We also provide maintenance visits that seek to survey your current maintenance approach and help you identify ways to make this more reliable, reducing downtime. 

Learn more about our maintenance and repair services and book a consultation today.

Once your processes have been analyzed, it allows you the chance to obtain a bigger picture outlook. Plus, you can develop all new strategies that center around things like reliability, speed of application, maintainability and cost saving, all with trustworthy insights and data to back it up.

Reducing Breakdowns

Key operations grinding to a halt are the biggest barrier to manufacturing plant productivity. Pumps shutting down, conveyor belts stopping or equipment overheating leads to a severe dent in your output very quickly. The hours or days your machinery is down for quickly adds up, leading to hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost productivity. 

External training and consultancy can help increase uptime for your business. Prevent or reduce instances of unplanned downtime due to machinery breakdown with the right strategic outlook. Empower your team with the knowledge to carry out effective maintenance in a way that minimizes downtime. 

You can reduce downtime and increase plant productivity through effective practical training to: 

• Learn new techniques and skills to increase equipment reliability
• Identify and eliminate common failure modes
• Apply the correct solution for the given situation
• Improve inventory management 
• Create a culture of reliability within your plant

Find out more about reducing unplanned downtime with effective maintenance and strategy.

Improve Reliability and Maintainability

Breakdowns, whether temporary or permanent, have a significant impact on productivity. It’s not just the cost of replacing the equipment or the downtime caused by not being able to use it either. 

Depending on where the fault falls in your plant’s process, it can cause a line stop, which then holds up work further down the line. 

This affects what your plant produces, along with staff working hours, and targets. If the rest of the line stops, workers involved further down may experience periods of downtime and zero productivity, too. 

There’s also the labor time and costs to consider, along with testing new equipment and the time it takes to get back up to speed. 

As well as helping you define your future maintenance plans, bringing in on-site experts can help you leverage data and analyze your site’s shortcomings to identify the best product to maximize the period between downtime on your site. While most companies collect data, many don’t know how to make the most of it.

Explore the full LOCTITE^® product range to find out how threadlockers, sealants, and other solutions can extend the life of your machinery to reduce the need for repairs. Our products are focused on giving you peace of mind, making your machinery more reliable and easily maintainable to ensure you maximize uptime and plant productivity.

The Right Person for the Job

Using outside maintenance contractors is common practice to ensure maintenance jobs are carried out safely and effectively. However, because they’re not always on-site, dealing with downtime while waiting for them to arrive is a challenge.  

One effective solution is to delegate specific repair and maintenance jobs to your existing workforce.

Strategic scheduling and developing a system to ensure there’s always someone with the right abilities on-site can help eliminate lost productivity as you wait for the right contractor to arrive.   

With the right training, you can also empower existing employees with the knowledge to determine the right tools, adhesives, and other products. They can also learn preventative maintenance techniques to improve overall manufacturing efficiency when you don’t have a specialist on-site.

Tweak Your Assembly Methods 

The way you assemble your products has probably been fine-tuned over the years. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be improved further to boost manufacturing productivity. Whether that’s reducing production costs, employing slicker application methods, or finding a product that cures in place quicker, small gains can make a huge difference. 

For example, using an adhesive product you can dispense in custom volumes may help cut time, waste and cost by automatically applying the product throughout processes.

Learn how Henkel OEM services can help you increase productivity and efficiency in manufacturing, with line audits designed to drill into your existing approach and find new ways to do things that enhance your productivity. 

Our operatives will collaborate with you, looking at how we can help develop customized solutions to improve performance and increase volume production. 

Explore more Henkel MRO services to find solutions that can help your business strategize more effectively for long-term success.