If your manufacturing process is unreliable, then you are spending more on operating costs than you need to be.
While we're under constant pressure from Management to improve, we know that you cannot improve what you do not measure. So we must conclude if we want to make our process “reliable” we must measure the process reliability.
The search for measurable data that can be utilized may seem hard. Equally hard could be a high-level understanding of when a process is reliable, and what specifically must a process exhibit to be deemed reliable?
Fortunately for many, the daily production data is often the most accurate data found in a manufacturing plant. It is also easy to find a source for this data. After all, this one daily number represents the efforts of the entire team across a 24 hours total. With just this one number, your management represents the relative health of the manufacturing process to their peers.
But how do you convert this “number” into “reliability” and what does it show us?
For starters, we can calculate the “lost opportunity” costs due to process variation. We can also identify the causes and assign actionable tasks to reduce these losses. While care must be taken in the use of certain production numbers, generally speaking, once understood, the number your organization tracks can be utilized to determine your process reliability.
A world class “reliable process” is one that is operated at or near its functional capacity with low variability. Day in and day out the process delivers as promised.
A manufacturing process that can routinely deliver the expected result is one that is considered “reliable”. The daily output number can be measured in output tons, widgets per hour, or really any other measurement that your organization has adopted for production success.
The key to sustaining high levels of manufacturing process reliability is the ability to recognize when the asset is not fully healthy while it still may be producing “acceptable levels” of throughput. Next, you must learn methods to diagnose which portion of the asset or subsystem is responsible for the degraded performance.
Analysis
This plant is reliable only about 50% of the time. Within this time of “reliable operation”, you should expect the plant to produce between 70% and 95% of the process maximum capacity.
That is a profound statement.
Conversely stated, 50% of the time you should expect this process to result in less than 70% of the capacity.
Equally profound.
The plant exhibits a significant loss when it is operating in an “unreliable” fashion. In fact, almost 30% of the capacity of the plant is lost each year.
