Production Monitoring
Production monitoring is a very important task in production management to measure the production progress by tracking achievement towards production targets and increase the productivity of the factory. Using a production progress board is a ...
Production monitoring is a very important task in production management to measure the production progress by tracking achievement towards production targets and increase the productivity of the factory. Using a production progress board is a simple but effective way to track the production progress.
Prospective users:
The production manager will need to take the lead in developing the initial monitoring system, in collaboration with the technical department. Line supervisors will be responsible for implementing the system.
This practice can be applied to all kinds of factories.
ProblemS addressed
- Low productivity of some lines
- Unbalanced lines
- Bottlenecks within production lines
Process
This practice involves developing a productivity monitoring system which can allow measurement and analysis of hourly production figures. All line managers collect information about the production productivity for their lines on an hourly basis and write them on a public production progress table. Total figures can then be analyzed to assess performance of each line, monitor progress towards meeting production targets and identify any difficulties.
Steps in implementation
- Use the Production Schedule board as the basis for monitoring the production progress on an hourly basis at each production line (Refer to GPG #7 on Production Scheduling).
- Set up a line productivity control signboard to help track the number of products produced at each line in every hour. Use of an electronic control signboard is a good replacement for traditional white board.
- After every hour, line managers fill in the hour productivity figure of each production line on each cells of the Production Scheduling board, besides each target figure.
- Depending of the purpose of the management, line managers can also calculate and fill in the cumulative number of products from the beginning of the shift.
- Sum the total number of products in each line and calculate the productivity rate by dividing total actual number of products by total target productivity.
- Calculate the difference between actual production and planning and fill in the result into the last column.
- Sum up total number of products in each hour and fill in the numbers into the last row.
- If are there any abnormal differences between the target and actual figures (the actual number is much smaller than the target), find out the reasons behind. If the reasons is unavoidable and acceptable, for example not enough workers or maintenance of machines, note down the reasons. Otherwise, it is very important to find out the reasons caused the low productivity and try to fix it.
- Line managers to record information
- Medium-side board with designed table to collect line productivity information and pens available at the beginning of each line
- Large sized board with designed production progress table and pens available at the workshop
- Using white board and makers are easier to write, but also easy to be erased incidentally or on purpose
- Difficult to maintain efforts in capturing information
- Positive impacts
- Productivity control boards created and updated
- Information is transferred from the productivity control board to the production progress table in-time
- Production information is summarized after ach working days and record in to excel file.
Funding for the Factory Improvement Programme is provided by the Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs and the United States Department of Labor.
