Weather You Need Production Control (And We Did Spell That Correctly)

What could you do to prepare yourself should that happen?  Is it wiser to build a plan for the events that you think might happen or would it be better to just make yourself and your organization more flexible to handle whatever may come? 

Be Flexible or Have a Plan?

I feel like we’ve asked a lot of questions today, so let’s try some answers here.  I’m always in favor of flexibility over a plan.  A plan is only as good as the speed with which you can achieve that.  You see that everywhere.  Let’s use a sports analogy to illustrate this.

When you get to Olympic-caliber sports, athletes have a plan for everything they think will happen.  They bring extra equipment.  They train for injury prevention and they even build a plan for varying weather conditions, especially for those who train and compete outdoors.  But the highest caliber athletes also build resilience into their plan.  The ones who win may find the ability to “grab the gold” simply because they were more flexible than their competitors and were able to overcome an unexpected set of circumstances that could not be controlled, but had to be competed in.

Why Production Control Matters

The same thing applies for you as a manufacturer.  You need to be flexible because none of us know what is going to happen tomorrow in our business, our economy, our world.  Your largest customer could shift tomorrow (note that I don’t wish that on anyone, but it happens).  Instead of planning for every single thing that could go wrong, why not focus on what you could to about it, not knowing what it is?

Building a manufacturing plan for flexibility starts with complete Production Control.  If you don’t know what’s going on in production today, then you have little capacity to see where you could implement changes that would be effective when something goes wrong.  Production Control involves knowing a few critical things:

• what is going on at any moment in time including what may happen tomorrow,
• how much time and money you actually spend on the work you do and
• when you are or are not going to be able to complete your work on time. 

These three pieces of data are perhaps the most important information that your shop needs and can use. 

Researching your next shop floor solution? Start with the fundamentals: 
What the Size of Your Shop Says About Your Production Needs

What Do You Need to Know to be Flexible?

When you know what’s going on at any time, you have the ability to pivot in order to take care of an issue when something unexpected happens.  A live schedule, one that changes automatically as work progresses through production, gives you immediate access to these choices.  If you know how much it actually costs you to produce your goods, as business shifts you can increase (or decrease) the work you do, how you do it and how much you charge for it to reduce any negative impact of the change.  It also helps you know how much work you can take on.  Lastly, when you know what work you will complete on time (and, more importantly, which one(s) you won’t), you can plan for an inevitable problem coming down the pike and avoid it.

This last one is perhaps the most critical because it’s the only one that gives you the control to affect your future.  Your ability to predict on-time work gives you the ability to avoid issues.  It’s you controlling your outcomes, reducing the numbers of problems you have to solve.  The reason we don’t put it first on the list is that you need to know what’s going on right now and the time and cost of production in order to be able to get there. 

Production Control is tricky.  In today’s ever-shifting “whether” patterns in manufacturing, however, it’s absolutely critical.  And there’s something that you can do about it today, no matter your size.  Curious?  Ask us how at www.cimx.com/askcimx.

Next Steps

Don’t put your company at risk by leaving the keys to your data in the wrong hands. Work with the CIMx Experts that understand security is not a nice to have; it’s critical to your success.

To learn more about protecting your shop and keeping production on track, visit www.CIMx.com.