When you are working in production you are constantly looking for ways to improve your processes and maximize your profits. This is great way to secure staying power for the future of your business. Here are our top tips on ways you can improve your manufacturing processes.
Internalize Your Fleet
Having an external fleet operation is always a hassle in terms of long-term improvements to processes with manufacturing because how are you going to get your products to your customers if you don’t have a fleet. While there are companies out there that take advantage of that and use hire vehicles as a result, this inevitably costs more money than bringing these operations in-house. You can take responsibility for maintenance, tracking and repair and bring the overall cost down so that it is less than if you outsource the operation. And by using GPS fleeting tracking you can also ensure that your drivers are doing what they should be when they should be, especially if you are sending your drivers overseas where the driving rules are different.
Review Your Workflow
This seems like an obvious solution but sometimes workflow overhauls are an essential part of reviewing your overall business strategies. Evaluation and review are key steps in every type of development protocol and, as a result, if you are not regularly doing this, especially when you are making your products, you are losing out on valuable experience. Understanding when it’s time to embrace change and innovation within your workflow is invaluable.
Is there a specific amount of shrinkage happening in a specific location, for example? If so, then maybe addressing that by bringing in specific regulations or practices to staff that work there may help. Sometimes the easiest solution is the most obvious, but you can’t really get there without some sort of evaluation process.
Training and Development
Learning your role better with all these updated technologies and systems means sitting in a classroom for a couple of weeks and making sure you know the theory as well as the operations. It can be irritating for everyone involved – especially if you have a customer service element that needs to be retrained with a new system because not everyone is cut out for customer service. Making sure that everyone is brought up to code on new health and safety information, however, is also a legal requirement. If you want to see how that went down look at the introduction of GDPR a few years ago – mandatory training was brought into many different sectors as a result. Just remember the key point in that investing in your workforce is investing in your business.
Update Processes and Tech
Again, seemingly obvious, but there are always ways that you can save money by simply updating the technology you’re using. Sometimes this can be as large as updating an entire computer system so that it’s no longer based on the MSDOS version that predated all computer systems older than ten years. Sometimes it can be as simple as using a tracking system to ensure that the mileage for your haulage concern is actually doing the mileage necessary so that you can crack down on people padding their expense files. It’s all about finding the areas in your operations that need updating.
