Today, manufacturing processes are a major part of most businesses. It provides employment for organizational workers and is the only way to bring science to life. Thus, there is a need for organizations to improve their performance so as to create significant value for their businesses. This is made possible through manufacturing excellence approach that helps organizations to adapt to new as well as changing markets. Manufacturing excellence ensures that a rigorous assessment is carried out on the overall performance of organizations so that it is in line with the financial impact expected for the organization as well as ensuring that organizational manufacturing standard is reached. This paper is a manufacturing excellence report for Obeikan Investment Group. The report is prepared to help the top management as well as the line managers in ensuring that the company is effective in its manufacturing processes by assessing the current status of the manufacturing processes including the wastages, defects as well as areas that need to be improved within the next 12 months so that the business becomes more efficient and thus capable of meeting its business needs and satisfying customers.
Manufacturing excellence
The Manufacturing Excellence approach is a methodology that originated from lean manufacturing philosophy and applies to both large and small organizations in low and high volume manufacturing environments. It is based on established tools and techniques that together make up lean manufacturing framework. Manufacturing Excellence assessment is used in understanding and supporting organizations that drive their business results using lean tools, philosophies, and techniques. The two main components in manufacturing excellence include the diagnostic element where monitoring of lean practical application is evaluated in various specific areas in the manufacturing sections such as work areas, production lines and in cells. The management commitment element is used to understand the efforts made by the senior organization in enabling lean manufacturing, thus delivering business results that are within company boundaries such as suppliers and customers. The objective of manufacturing excellence is delivering the manufacturing targets in an organization through OEE, NWC, OTIF and CCR through excellence that enable the business to deliver its vision. This is done through PDCA methodology that seeks to improve monthly manufacturing cycle by seeking to better the manufacturing excellence in the manufacturing activities occurring daily within an organization. The utilization of PDCA approach is meant to assess or quantify the current manufacturing status and capabilities, optimizing current capability and delivering a breakthrough manufacturing excellence.
Departmental Daily Tracking
The diagnostic element of manufacturing excellence is primarily based on core lean tools as well as techniques within high adoption to low adoption scenarios. Business organizations must progress from low to high adoption, and the assessment in a diagnostic box is normally given a score that ranges from 0 – 4. Higher scores represent high adoption, ‘not applicable’ score is usually not included in the diagnostic assessment. The scores are used in providing the circumstances with strong and priority relevance so that the company understands particular areas of interest that it needs to improve on. The diagnostic score and experience are used in ensuring that specific areas of improvement within a manufacturing cycle offer real drivers of cost, quality as well as delivering improvements. The visual control delivery schedule achievements within the work area display any planned versus actual delivery that are evident in the process. It also gives reasons for variance and thus corrective actions will be recorded. The proposed plan for correction is usually communicated to the executive and operation management team, and this is continually reviewed for update by the cell members. The achievement non-conformance assessment is where scarp, otherwise known as non-conformance cost, will be displayed; the defect levels within the manufacturing cycle are also compared with departmental targets with the aim of reducing the wastages. This is done by evaluating the historical records with an aim of taking corrective actions. Quality, cycle time and delivery as the main areas that show the improvements that are needed to be taken before cost conformance is realized. The skills matrix evaluation is used to assess the availability of skills within a manufacturing set such as soft skills and if those skills are in line with current as well as planned capacity. Evidence must be shown that there are competencies for future planned improvements within the organization such as availability of training programs to support the manufacturing cycle requirements.
Work environment and safety assessment
The work organizational assessment is used to evaluate if there is a clean as well as an appropriate work environment design capable of supporting the required manufacturing cycles and capacities. It ensures that there are policies as well as standards agreed and followed during the manufacturing process such as storage areas, pathways in the manufacturing floor, safety equipment and that all work areas, as well as hazards, are marked clearly to avoid errors within the organization. The current safety measure is 80% while the target is 100%. The address and place assessment is used to ensure that work in progress, consumables and materials are marked clearly as well as held within identifiable locations in suitable storage media. It also ensures that frequently used tools are within the working areas in shadow boards while the low-frequency tools are held offline. This is in addition to ensuring that color codes within the manufacturing areas are effective in identifying different products, storage areas, and floor marking. The setup reduction assessment is used to give a detailed analysis of the set up internal and external elements that need continuous improvements such as key processes that addresses the SUR activity and that the SUR activities link with batch and inventory reductions. Standardized job evaluations are used to formalize standards through documented tasks, times and procedures that are related to machines, equipment, materials, and manpower. The manufacturing team members must understand so as to contribute towards the definition of the standards. The standard job benchmark shows significant deviation from actual versus the standard time. The quality tools evaluation monitors and reports if work area manufacturing team members are trained on the usage of the 7 quality tools. There must be evidence that the processes, test as well as inspection data is easily accessible and used by manufacturing staff members.
Performance tracking
The statistical process control monitoring ensures that manufacturing machinery operators have been trained in the collection as well as analyzing SPC data by understanding the principles of Statistical Process Control. Thereafter, the operators must be capable of taking a corrective from control conditions. Overall Equipment Effectiveness is a measure that is used to display the current status of all manufacturing equipment, tools, and machinery. This measure should be higher than the industry which is currently measured at 60% and should be aimed to be above 85% from the current level of 80% for Obeikan Investment Group. The assessment also ensures that the manufacturing team members understand the OEE principles as well as the appropriate actions that are needed to counter any deviation during manufacturing performance. The collection of data for the OEE evaluation should be automated to ease and fasten the monitoring and reporting processes. The productivity improvement assessment is used to measure if work area members of staff have been trained in the techniques that identify and eliminated wastes within the manufacturing cycle. This evaluation is meant to remove waste and reduce defects in active activities through SMART actions. The actual and the target productivity are normally displayed, and no-value-added processes that are manual are removed and replaced with automated ones.
Loss and waste management
Waste processing technique ensures that there is value stream mapping used to routinely identify opportunities needed to improve the manufacturing time. The process efficiency is calculated through dividing value added time with total lead time so as to acquire results needed to improve targets that have been set. It also looks at process operations have been optimized, documented as well as reviewed with equipment designed appropriately and effectively. Waste movement operation assessment monitors and reports that manufacturing operators work effectively with minimal bending, walking, lifting, stretching and reaching. This is done through providing operators with materials, jigs and fixtures, and next job specifications and instructions. Here, work ergonomics are best considered within an organization. Waste transportation assessment ensures that there is minimum distance that is required for transporting materials, tools, and products and that this transportation is made possible through uni-directional flow. The operations also need to ensure that operations in the manufacturing area are coupled with work benches, equipment, and plant. The transportation media such as the lean belts should be designed so as to fully protect the manufacture of products from damage as they are under transport from one stage of manufacturing to the next. The waste defect assessment ensures that detection mechanisms to prevent losses in the key processes are employed such as in process checks that capture errors in the initial manufacturing processes and proofing the mistakes. The operators must also ensure that they adopt self-inspection in the jobs and processes. The defect root cause, as well as corrective action analysis, is used in verifying and updating process checks through self-inspecting manufacturing processes. The defects and loss in time waiting in the manufacturing process is assessed to ensure that operators work effectively by adding value to the manufacturing process. The product in the manufacturing cycle must move to the following operation without unjustifiable delays. The equipment and plant bottlenecks are minimized to reduce waiting time wastages by having a mechanism put in place to schedule the next job to the manufacturing line.
The inventory waste and loss assessment monitors and reports manufactured products in predefined batches. It ensures that only work in progress and planned materials are held in stock and that suppliers deliver agreed batches in line with cell usage. The inventory usage is optimized to maintain effectiveness and efficiency in the manufacturing process in the organization. The manufacturing overproduction waste management assessment takes care of the manufactured product quantities by ensuring that they are within the customer schedule and that there are only minimum and planned inventory of finished goods in the Obeikan Investment Group store. The current defects and loss measure is 80% while the target is greater than 85%. This is done through a customer-company-supplier interface that is synchronized in real time.
Leadership and human capital analysis
On the other hand, management commitment evaluation element in organizations is used to understand whether the managerial processed in Obeikan Investment Group enable Lean operations in the company and thus manufacturing excellence has been achieved. It measures what results have been achieved through the current management practices and if the continued management commitment to these management principles will achieve the required capacities of the organizations. It also assesses if the business management team are aware of the lean manufacturing operations in manufacturing processes and how they are capable of causing improved capacities within their organizations. All modern organizations including Obeikan Investment Group must be capable of responding to the changes that are occurring within their business environment so as to meet the emerging demands of its customers and consumers of its products. These changes are only achievable within a strong leadership framework that transforms the organization to win the new intensive competitions that they are faced within their operating environment. In a business setup, leadership is considered to be the heart of achieving the unit vision in reality.
In a real sense, the essential characteristics of a leader in business are that they must embody their organizational values, principles, and purposes. They must have a strong as well as clearly defined character and personal value in choosing what is right for Obeikan Investment Group instead of their own personal gains. Leaders must be honest, be persons of high integrity and be people with deep respect for their colleagues. They need to be committed to achieving their organizational greatness stated in the company vision, mission and objectives as it does its business with other business enterprises. They also need to be enthusiastic about continuous learning to incorporate the new technologies in the market in the manufacturing field to help their business processes to be up to date. In addition, the managers need to incite inspiration and passion in other people under their care as change agents. When they realize that there is some deviation between the actual performance and the targeted performance, they must be capable of correcting the deviation. They must also be caring for the people that they manage and lead in ensuring that the business employees are cohesive by ensuring that the business environment is cohesive for the attainment of organizational goals.
Conclusion
In conclusion, this report shows the specific steps that Obeikan Investment Group needs to follow to achieve manufacturing excellence by diagnostic elements and management commitment element. By following these steps, the company will improve its operational effectiveness by reducing costs, improving quality and reducing wastages.
