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Increase Manufacturing Capacity In Times Of Crisis With Lean Principles

October 6, 2023
Bill Kimball

It represents manufacturing only good parts, as fast as possible, with no down time, around the clock (24/7).

By having such a common understanding, the decision makers can help provide focus on the improvement activities the capacity planners should undertake. It is always difficult to raise the capital which you think is good enough to start the business. Raising capital from the market is always a time-consuming process and proper planning is a must. Planning ahead always helps you in using your resources in the best possible way.

improve capacity

We have tightened the licensing rules to limit increases in the number of vessels and to prevent increasing capacity. After the capacity review meeting, the CoP should issue a report to top management on IT capacity status and recommend changes as necessary. The report should be stored as part of the capacity record and the CoP should review the previous report as part of the next capacity review meeting. Take the time to go through your operational records to see how many incidents are a result of capacity breaches. Document the number of requests the business has made to change capacity.

Further, marking material flow right to the point of use increases the employee’s overall effectiveness. We have various levels of talent, IQ, and capability to expand or develop, and our individual capacity should grow until we reach our potential.

Strategies For Increasing Manufacturing Capacity

Theory of Constraints is a collection of improvement techniques based on the idea that every manufacturing process has a constraint that acts as a fulcrum for the entire process. Focusing improvement efforts on the constraint helps ensure that resources are optimized and is often one of the fastest routes to increased capacity. Emphasizing the constraint focuses teams and can quickly unlock additional capacity at the manufacturing process bottleneck. Theory of Constraints is tightly aligned to increasing capacity as its primary emphasis is on increasing throughput. The term “community capacity building” began to be used in 1995 and since then became popular for example within the policy literature in the United Kingdom, particularly in the context of urban policy, regeneration and social development. It is, however, difficult to distinguish it from the practice of “community development”. It is “built on a deficit model of communities which fails to engage properly with their own skills, knowledge and interests”.

In turn, this will streamline production while boosting customer service. An increased capacity makes businesses more resilient and will help prepare for growth now and in the future. Use the built-in TEEP reports to identify how much additional production capacity is available. OEE is ideally suited for supervisors that want to benchmark and measure progress in reducing Equipment Losses. It provides one simple metric, the OEE score, with which to gauge progress. Even better, it aligns perfectly with the Six Big Losses to provide valuable insights on where to focus improvement efforts and what type of improvement actions will be most effective. We don’t recommend OEE as the primary metric for operators – it is a bit too abstract.

We see a lot of would-be entrepreneurs struggling to adapt sudden changes in production, demand, manufacturing etc. Planning and Scheduling are the two cornerstones for successful operations, including capacity utilization. In the 1970s, international organizations emphasized building capacity through technical skills training in rural areas, and also in the administrative sectors of developing countries. In the 1980s they expanded the concept of institutional development further. “Institutional development” was viewed as a long-term process of interventions in a developing country’s government, public and private sector institutions, and NGOs. The United Nations Committee of Experts on Public Administration in 2006 offered an additional term, “community capacity building”.

  • Focusing improvement efforts on the constraint helps ensure that resources are optimized and is often one of the fastest routes to increased capacity.
  • Broadly defined as the ability to carry out stated objectives , capacity is a coveted aspect of human capital.
  • A framework of individual capacity strengthening across intra-personal, inter-personal, and technical domains is proposed, as an initial step towards building a common consensus of individual capacity strengthening for future work.
  • Certain ERP or warehouse management systems can help find ways to optimize the supply chain in real-time by monitoring processes, tracing job speed, reviewing operations, and more.
  • This is done by a combination of metrics that help define the utilization rate and the gap required to address it and improve.
  • Theoretical Capacity is the amount you would produce if there were no Equipment Losses and no Schedule Losses.

Applying this framework to the current review, all 55 studies measured technical or clinical aspects of health care, 19 measured intra-personal aspects such as confidence, self-efficacy and attitude, and two measured inter-personal aspects of leadership and resources. Figure2 offers a summary of this framework, whereby individual capacity building is conceptualised as a broader, more comprehensive and strategic model. We propose that initiatives to strengthen individual-level capacity and truly embed change within organisations and environments must therefore take into consideration the need to build capacity across these three spheres. Notably, we argue that one domain is insufficient to be considered ‘capacity strengthening’ and encourage that going forward, the use of the term ‘capacity strengthening’ be reserved for broader, multi-faceted, interventions working across more than one domain. Capacity strengthening interventions ranged from disease prevention and surveillance, to clinical, management and supervision interventions. Each study contained some form of training for primary health care workers with the duration of training ranging from 2.5 hours to a 4-year ongoing programme. Interventions employed an array of educational resources including manuals, activities at conferences and workshops, lectures and e-learning supports, mentorship, and case studies and role plays, overall encompassing both didactic and experiential learning.

Identifying Relevant Studies

They say you should know your product best before starting your business, just like that, you should be familiar with every tiny detail regarding the capacities in your hand. Consider various situations and create innovative ideas to maximize utilization and therefore, profits. This may be to meet actual increases in demand or planned increases in demand. They may also be used for short-term and long-term spikes in demand as well. Regardless, there are several basic strategies to increase capacity and optimize a manufacturing plant to take on the extra load. Once the capacity is known for all equipment, the impact of the Six Big Losses will result in a utilization level for each machine and the factory. Increasing capacity means understanding and managing those variables favorably.

improve capacity

Production capacity refers to the maximum volume of products a manufacturing operation can produce. A company increases production capacity to meet an actual increase in demand, or an anticipated one.

Long Term

This may include hiring staff, strategically outsourcing or working with current staff to better utilize software. Despite some 20 years recognizing the problems, practitioners continue to note that some capacity development projects are just “throwing money at symptoms with no logic or analysis”. One common problem of interventions that focus on education and training of foreign government officials is that they are akin to trying to “teach elephants to fly” or to “teach wolves not to eat sheep” while avoiding the actual changes needed for impact.

improve capacity

Validated scales were used in 19 studies, including the Nursing Best Practice Guidelines ; Objective Structured Clinical Assessment ; and the mental health Global Action Programme Knowledge Assessment and Attitude Scale . Done deliberately, increasing capacity is a terrific way to respond to changes in the market quickly, reduce lead times, fulfil larger orders, and scale a business sustainably. By planning ahead and making sure software, people, and processes are aligned, the path to growth will be much easier to traverse with less risk and more reward.

Tips To Stay Motivated On The Service Desk

It is an attribute of people, individual organizations and groups of organizations. Capacity is shaped by, adapting to and reacting to external factors and actors, but it is not something external — it is internal to people, organizations and groups or systems of organizations.

Critique of capacity development has been centered on the ambiguity surrounding it in terms of its anticipated focus, its effectiveness and, the unwillingness or inability of public agencies to apply their own principles and international law. The UNDP was one of the forerunners in designing international interventions in the category of capacity building and development. In the early 1970s, the UNDP offered guidance to its staff and governments on what it called “institution-building” which is one of the pillars of its current work and is part of a category of “public administration reform”. Once you’ve determined your OEE and gotten a sense of machine uptime and downtime, you may find that one of the most significant drains on your capacity is unplanned downtime due to machine breakdowns. One crucial tactic for reducing breakdowns at unexpected times , is to schedule machine maintenance proactively, rather than waiting for a breakdown to occur. Increasingly, sophisticated machine learning algorithms are being trained to predict potential machine failures in advance and schedule minimally-disruptive maintenance before that happens.

Instead, for the plant floor we recommend using real-time TAED , which is driven by Takt Time. Some methods of capacity building for NGOs might include visiting training centers, organizing exposure visits, office and documentation support, on-the-job training, learning centers, and consultations. The UNDP integrated this capacity-building system into its work on reaching the Millennium Development Goals by the year 2015. A systematic scoping review of the literature was carried out following procedures described by Arksey and O’Malley’s and Levac, Colquhoun and O’Brien . Scoping review methodology was chosen because of the potential wide array of relevant literature, and because of the recognised value of scoping reviews in clarifying concepts or to investigate research conduct . The current review included articles published from 2000—corresponding to the launch of the Millennium Development Goals—to October 2020. An initial search was conducted in July 2018, subsequently updated to October 2020.

The review’s full inclusion and exclusion criteria are summarised in Table 1. It also takes place at the level of the organisation (i.e. through improved partnership, leadership, or governance infrastructure) ; and at the level of the community (i.e. community health programming) . A common inference however, is that intervening at one level (i.e. at the level of the individual primary health care worker) will subsequently result in observable changes within another level (i.e. organisational) . Since the 1950s, international organizations, governments, non-governmental organizations and communities use the concept of capacity building as part of “social and economic development” in national and subnational plans.

You can start small with this by putting a sensor in one piece of equipment and scaling as needed. This is a prime example of software and technology working together and is often the start of a digital transformation journey. It’s also important to ensure that any other technology — such as smart inventory control systems and online order management systems — are integrated with this software so that everything is accessible, and you can see how it works together.

For example, Murugesan et al. built knowledge of doctors on diabetes care assuming this would lead to changes in their attitude and approach to chronic care of diseases and increase the national capacity for management of diabetes. One of the benefits of digitization is that it can help pave the way for huge improvements in the quality, speed, and availability of data—even facilitating the integration of real-time information into your value chain. If your organization has achieved this level of digital sophistication, new workflows suddenly become available to you. Sales & operations execution (S&OE) for instance, is a relatively new process that has emerged in recent years to fill in the gaps between day-to-day operations and longer-term sales & operations planning (S&OP). By monitoring real-time fluctuations in demand and transport conditions, S&OE keeps mid-term plans on track by responding to small disruptions and deviations from expectations on a daily and weekly basis. In 2007, specific criteria for effective evaluation and monitoring of the capacity building of NGOs were proposed, though only in generalities without clear measures for the tool. The proposal suggested only that evaluating the capacity building ability of NGOs should be based on a combination of monitoring the results of their activities and also a more open flexible way of monitoring that also takes into consideration, self-improvement and cooperation.

Knowledge as a sole domain was strengthened primarily on clinical and technical subjects, with a more limited number of studies focusing on management and supervision. For example, Citraningtyas et al. built knowledge to enhance mental health workers’ understanding of how to provide assistance to children and adolescents in disaster affected areas in Indonesia. Strengthening of skills as the sole domain tended towards strengthening leadership and management skills among supervisors . In the 18 studies which measured skills alongside knowledge, capacity strengthening was conceptualised as both increases in content knowledge and observed practice, over a range of topics ranging from health promotion to disease surveillance , and infection control . Capacity strengthening of primary health care workers is widely used as a means to strengthen health service delivery, particularly in low- and middle-income countries. Despite the widespread recognition of the importance of capacity strengthening to improve access to quality health care, how the term ‘capacity strengthening’ is both used and measured varies substantially across the literature.