PROCESS EFFICIENCY IN MANUFACTURING

By: Evan Lucyk

What many of you may not know is that Bit Service has a few different facilities that we operate. At our facility in Esterhazy, we do a lot of high-volume manufacturing of underground mining bits, so the topic of process efficiency is always at the forefront of our minds.

Inevitably, in any type of manufacturing, as you go through the process and are doing something in volume, there’s always a point where you step back and ask yourself: “How could we improve upon this?” “How can we do better, more, etc.?”

Call us perfectionists if you like, but at Bit Service we come to this point often. Recently, we found ourselves coming to a bit of a crossroads, where the common thought in the industry was that to increase production output, we needed to add more equipment or increase our personnel level.

But we weren’t entirely sold that this was the most efficient, so we began digging into the process to determinge the strong points and work on enhancing these while revising the remaining. It all started with a robot named Reggie. We had just finished commissioning and installing our new robot in our Esterhazy facility, so we found ourselves observing the whole process, post-commissioning. Inevitably, once Reggie was up and running, that is when the inefficiencies in the whole overall process started to appear.

So we began honing our process, which is a method that comes down to balancing production quality and the production volumes to ensure that our quality is high but also to try to increase the throughput. This objective is, of course, only attainable when armed with quality data and metrics to be able to compare against. This means that you have to record as much as you can at each phase of the process to be able to compare different items (labor hours, equipment, different areas of production data).

You also have to have a good process map to outline all the procedures and times at each step. This will allow you to track transition times, downtime, and set up times, which is crucial because getting rid of the unproductive times—as opposed to making something run faster—is really where you gain that productive efficiency.

This is now a set process that we follow religiously. And with this data, we review, review, and review. To recap: Instead of simply coming to the crossroads mentioned above and addressing issues by increasing capital expenditures or adding more people, we look more internally first. We review data and tweak small things, and make sure that what we were doing currently is the most efficient way to do it—without going through and putting additional strain on the existing employees.

The bottom line is that we don’t want to just work our people harder and faster; we want to make their jobs easier by smoothing out inefficiencies as we go along. As with anything worth doing, the process requires patience to be done right. This means following our process, step by step, taking things in incremental stages of implementation—small things a little at a time, so we’re not introducing a lot of new variables or causing new problems. In this way, we are fine-tuning and ensuring that it’s giving us the desired result, then gauging that, and then furthering some of those modifications. And on and on we go.

If you’d like to find out how Bit Service can help you maximize your process efficiency in manufacturing, reach out to us today, and one of our experts would be more than happy to get you started.