Dos and Do Nots for KPIs

A key part of managing your shop floor is understanding the current state of the shop floor. And KPIs are an important part of understanding the shop floor. But this is also not always easy. In my experience, the three most common pitfalls are to underestimate the effort (and hence the cost) of measuring a KPI, to overestimate the accuracy of a number, and (worst of all) to believe that the numbers tell you everything. Time for a reality check…

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What Is Your Production Capacity?

Three HourglassesYour production capacity is one important aspect of your production system. The capacity has to match your demand. If your demand is higher than your capacity, then you will not be able to supply the customer. On the other hand, if your capacity is higher than the demand, then you will have lots of idle workers and machines, which is not good either. The name is actually a bit of a misnomer, since capacity is the ability to contain  things, whereas for a production system we are much more interested in the number of parts that are completed. In any case, capacity is important!

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Pitfalls of Takt Times

UCLA Marching BandThe customer takt (or takt time) is one of the fundamentals for determining the speed of a production system. After my post on How to determine Takt Times,  this second post on takt times gives a bit of history, and then goes into more details about possible pitfalls and problems when calculating the customer takt. I also added an example for easier understanding.

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How to determine Takt Times

The rhythm of your system
The rhythm of your system

The customer takt (or takt time) is one of the fundamentals for determining the speed of a production system. It represents the available time divided by the average demand of the customer during that time. Effectively this is the average time between the order of one item. Whenever you design a new production system or change an existing system, one of the early data inputs you need is the customer takt. While the customer takt can be simply calculated by dividing the demand by the time available for production, there are many more details needed to understand it fully.

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On the Different Ways to Measure Production Speed

Harold Lloyd – Safety Last!
Trouble with Times…

The speed of your production system is a key aspect of your manufacturing system, and controlling it is important for the success of your organization. Unfortunately, there are many different and confusing ways to measure the manufacturing speed. Even a simple question on how to call a speed is often confused, with many practitioners using the same term for different measurements, or different terms for the same measurements. This post aims to give an overview of what is out there, and what it is good for.

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