At Adroit we take a lean approach when addressing operations productivity.

There is a range of metrics to measure productivity including throughput, capacity utilization, overall equipment effectiveness, schedule variance, total manufacturing costs per unit excluding labor, and manufacturing costs as a percentage of revenue.  These are fine metrics but when looked at in isolation they don’t tell the whole story. 

We need to initially look at the full production system to get a context of where the waste resides.  Per lean, there are seven types of waste including:

• Transportation
• Motion
• Waiting
• Over production
• Over processing
• Defects.

We work with you to form a cross-functional improvement team to examine and map the full value stream. 

We also apply the theory of constraints and isolate choke points. We examine options to eliminate the choke points, and where we can’t, we focus on balancing flow to eliminate wait times. 

There is no point in overproducing ahead of the choke point if the inventory is just going to sit there.  We look at your product lines and determine which are candidates for pull systems and then implement them. We look at your change over time and do a change over reduction effort. We look at your scheduling assumptions and sequences to identify opportunities to improve change overtimes.  We setup downtime systems and studies to ensure we get a true read on the causes of downtime and then initiate a continuous improvement effort.