What you don’t know about your standards is hurting you!

As I mentioned in an earlier Blog this month…making an actual-to-standard comparison is important in two areas…costing and scheduling.  Knowing the flow time completes the process mapping and provides insights into areas to eliminate and or change to speed the flow of work and improve on time delivery.

Let’s examine the first metric…actual-to-standard comparison. Measuring the efficiency at an operation (actual-to-standard) comparison is a measurement that has been around for a long time.  Often it is called employee time tracking, manufacturing data collection, time and attendance or simply employee tracking.  And as many manufacturers have discovered, analyzing the time it takes to complete production during the shift has been less than successful…and the reason in many cases is apparent if one takes a realistic view of how the measure is obtained.

First, many times the data collected is based on the workers “guesstimate” of how long it took to complete a job or task.  As a result, the actual part of this measurement is often inaccurate.  For example, how often a job is completed exactly at the standard rate.  In an operation that involves labor recording, did you ever notice that if a job requiring the completion of 60 pieces that has a standard of 60 pieces/hour is recorded as one hour of production (not 65 minutes and certainly not 55 minutes) but 60 minutes exactly!  How often do you really think actual are exactly the same as standards…it is not real world…and it needs to be real and visible…you cannot improve what you can not accurately measure.

But beyond inaccurate actual time is the bigger problem of standard time validation.  There is only one good way to get lean, and that is to really understand the basics of manufacturing…the blocking and tackling.  Which means that somehow every manufacturer needs to find a way to verify the standard rate of production;  That way they can use it to improve their production process both in costing and in production scheduling…and begin the process of leaning-out unnecessary inventory and wasted capacity on the factory floor and improving the production management process.

I will discuss the second metric…flow time in Part IV.  As always, I welcome your comments.