How To Reduce Downtime in the Manufacturing Industry

Downtime is a costly consideration for every business. Along with reducing the amount of merchandise your company produces, there is the cost of repairing broken merchandise and employee morale. And unfortunately, some amount of downtime is inevitable.

Even so, you can still maximize productivity in your plant by learning how to reduce downtime in the manufacturing industry.

Protect Your Equipment

One of the most common causes of downtime is equipment breaking down. This is no surprise, given the sheer volume of machinery that any individual manufacturing plant uses. Finding ways to keep machinery up and running is the simplest way to reduce manufacturing downtime. A few practical ways to do this include:

• Implementing regular equipment inspections
• Following a preventative maintenance schedule
• Keeping up on machine lubrication
• Doing regular refresher training

Keep in mind that as every team is only as good as all its individual workers, equipment is only as effective as its individual parts. In other words, increasing the longevity of a spindle motor is as important as increasing the longevity of the entire CNC machine.

Improve Communication

Not every breakdown in manufacturing productivity comes from the equipment itself. Breakdowns in communication between team members can lead to an untold number of issues on the shop floor. At best, it can lead to slower work times; at worst, it can lead to dangerous accidents.

Improving communication starts with standardized training for every new employee. This will give everyone a universal set of vocabulary and make working together easier. Having refresher training courses throughout the year will also help increase communication among team members.

Automate Where Possible

We are all prone to making errors. While we can’t avoid it, we can do our part to cut out the element of human error as much as possible. One way to do this is by finding ways to implement automation in your manufacturing plant.

However, automation is only as effective as you make it. Here are a few ways to ensure your company incorporates automation well:

• Start small and build up.
• Bring experts along to help choose the right type of automation for your processes.
• Continue to train employees on new automation processes.
• Collect data through the entire process of incorporating automation.

Downtime happens. But when we as business leaders take strategic steps to minimize downtime, we can do our part to increase productivity across the board.