Strategies for Manufacturing Excellence
Strategic Value
through
OPERATIONAL EXCELLENCE
Manufacturing Operational Excellence delivers additional highly profitable capacity while enabling you to become the low-cost producer and most responsive provider
Operational Excellence improves profitability, capacity, and supply performance. High profit margins plus avoided capital expenditures compel its inclusion in any capacity strategy. Organizations need systems and expertise to identify potential capacity, to deliver results and to pursue other strategic supply optimization benefits.
business value:
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Low cost capacity gains
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Enhanced profit margins
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Ability to produce upon demand
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Cost optimization & operational flexibility (low cost producer)
strategic advantage:
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Global operational excellence: Manufacturing organization that executes and delivers
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Capacity Strategy: Ability to reliably identify and deliver hidden capacity
Success factors
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Ability to show business impact (gross profit, capacity)
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Leading indicators of of future success
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Global consistency
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Actionable improvement information
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Effective management and improvement processes
MxStrategies’ software is uniquely designed to enable your organization with the needed systems,
clean information and best practices. Our consulting services ensure value delivery.
MxMax Productivity™ provides a reliable and consistent foundation of
operational excellence information. MxMax SPI™ gives executives perspective to ensure
improvement processes are effective, results are clear and communications are efficient.
Global Visibility
and Consistency
Most Operational Excellence performance metrics (e.g. OEE) are inconsistent across processes and site because of process and culture differences. They can provide directional indications (over time) if changes in setup are visible, but do not project actual results.
Fortunately, every production line has a common denominator: delivered business value. It is possible to have information that is meaningful across global operations and ties out to business results for both executive and engineer level information.
MxMax™ is designed for consistency across processes, sites and cultures. MxMax Productivity™ provides production performance information and configures to put each process on the business value common denominator. It also enables Enterprise & Division level standardization & setup, to ensure consistency and allow cross-site analysis, while offering local language user experience alongside global language visibility.
MxMax SPI™ puts tactical & strategic information at the executive’s and manager’s fingertips.
MxStrategies' consultants excel in bringing hidden business potential to light
while implementing systems and practices that enable operational excellence.
Global Visibility and Consistency delivers business value through:
Organizational Alignment
Incremental success can be gained through pockets of excellence, but major transformative change
requires organizational alignment. Good systems and alignment enable the best and the rest to perform
better and leverage each other’s progress.
An aligned organization also has a larger potential achievement. Take, for example, equipment
reliability. For a typical process, 1/3 of production performance losses are directly relatable to equipment reliability and only 1/3 of that can be solved by maintenance and reliability alone.
However, maintenance, operations, reliability and engineering, working together, can impact all such losses. And for many operations, the largest available opportunities lie in the interface between roles.
So, how do you achieve such organizational alignment?
Consider starting with standardization.
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Having common systems, practices, metrics and technical terminology eliminates the misunderstanding and misdirection that otherwise eventually surfaces.
Also critical are shared goals, more particularly what Ron Moore describes as cascading metrics. If the business level goal is Manufacturing Productivity (yielding better production
performance and capacity), each organizational group and team needs goals whose impact traces to achievement of the
Manufacturing Productivity goal. This is dependent on the ability to quantify production losses in terms of production line impact and tie to actionable loss reasons. It is also dependent on having higher-level categories that group detailed categories by the practices and systemic issues that impact them.
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Executives seeing and pursuing business value
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Engineers leveraging improvement across sites
Mid and high-level categories, when well designed, can provide effective metrics for teams and different
roles. A high-level example could be equipment reliability, with a mid-level example of pump reliability.
The maintenance & reliability groups primary goal may be equipment reliability and a (multidisciplinary)
pump reliability improvement team’s goal may be pump reliability. This team uses loss details to identify
bad actors as they go about their initiative.
MxStrategies specializes in enabling organizations with the systems, best practices and knowledge
needed to achieve excellence in manufacturing. Our MxMax Productivity™ software is designed to bring
the needed standardization across organizations, while also encouraging local initiative. Augmented
with MxMax SPI™, it provides the executive with the business impact of production performance, gives visibility to the management processes that yield results and enables the cascading metrics that are essential to organizational alignment.
Cost Optimization
Optimal costs come from efficient and productive manufacturing operations, as opposed to cost cutting
that degrades process and practices. With Operational Excellence, as problems are solved and more
effective practices are employed, waste is eliminated, performance improves, costs decline, and
operations can be optimized. The systems and information required for operational improvement also
inform and enable executive decisions that increase competitiveness through manufacturing flexibility
and unit cost.
MxStrategies’ consultants have expertise to evaluate organizations and systems, identifying opportunities and deploying systems and practices to enable continuous data-driven improvement. Our MxMax™ software embeds in the organizations work processes, promoting best practice and enabling
the sustained pursuit that typifies Operational Excellence.
Retain The Gain
Operational excellence builds businesses into high quality / premium supply performance / low cost
providers; enabling first-to-market and last-one-standing business viability. However, it is all too often
that improvements gained are lost over subsequent years.
Gains are made when management attention is focused,
but the gains are often lost later as management
attention shifts and personnel changes occur.
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Real progress requires “retaining the gain”, so that each
year’s improvements are built on top of last year’s gain.
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Retaining the gain requires a mentality that pushes
solutions beyond the normal "finish line";
asking the questions:
"How do we make sure this never happens again?"
then embedding improvements into the systems
and training. But it also requires sustained attention
from the manufacturing and business executives.
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Executive attention can be retained through regular visibility to Operational Excellence's strategic value and progress. Their attention is naturally drawn to meeting their regular commitments, such as delivering monthly / quarterly production & costs. Imagine the impact of integrating strategic progress indicators into the same information flow!
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As executives and managers change jobs, retaining the operational excellence culture is essential to continued progress and results. Remember, if we are not moving forward, we are losing ground!
MxStrategies offers Operational Excellence / Reliability consulting and software services that deliver business value to our clients and enable their organization to continue to build-on and retain results.
MxMax Productivity™ embeds into the organization, engaging management, operations
and reliability in improving production performance. MxMax SPI™ embeds tactical excellence and strategic focus into an organization’s management and executive processes.
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Our consultants provide expertise to help customers "retain the gain" and build a culture of excellence.
Data Integrity
And Compliance
Effective regulatory compliance requires a manufacturing organization to show that its systems,
processes and practices ensure compliance and show the integrity of underlying data. Many
organizations still rely on unvalidated software, including spreadsheets. Reliance on manual systems to
compile and communicate records can be inefficient and subject to error. Many organizations struggle
with these and other essentials for effective, regulated manufacturing compliance:
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‘Audit-ready’ records and documentation
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Verifiable & timely production data collection
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Communication & coordination to ensure
proper approvals / signatures
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Software validation for electronic data,
records & signatures
These issues are even more difficult in a production line that needs to collect information from multiple
operating stations or a mixture of manual and automated data collection.
MxMax Comply™ is a validated system that enables efficient and effective regulatory compliance with
both basic and complex manufacturing processes. It maintains audit-ready electronic records and
signatures. It places the appropriate people in the organization in control, with embedded
authorizations, approvals and oversight. This functionality enables work processes and information flow
required to meet U.S. and harmonized global FDA regulatory requirements.
