Designing and manufacturing a product should never be a business of gambling. You might be betting on new technology, new recruits or even new markets, but anything you do is only gambling if you don’t know what you are doing. Robert Kiyosaki, the author of the best seller “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” opines that “being an intelligent and successful businessman is not something that’s taught at school, it is something that you become by learning.” It is the result of conscious effort, extensive brainstorming and scientific management of your resources.
Planning and executing a production line requires control and coordination of a number of singular functions. To strike a perfect balance between profitability and product quality, it is highly necessary that the manufacturer ensures that:
A company passes through a number of phases before commencing production. Once a new idea sets in, (s)he starts to contemplate the various use cases and scenarios of their product. Once they step into the execution stage, their focus spreads over the materials and BOM (Bill of Materials) and its various specifications, DFM (Design for Manufacturability), CAD, factory setup and others. The list keeps getting bigger.
The traditional industrialists were advocates of assembly lines wherein the semi-finished parts would flow in sequence from workstation to workstation until reaching the final assembly and the product is ready. However, innovations in the past 6-7 decades have resulted in increased divergence in processes and have resulted in different characterizations of production methods for each industry.
Tom White, of Missouri Enterprise Business Assistance Centre, has crafted a non-definition for Advanced Manufacturing. “Advanced manufacturing, by its very nature defies definition, because it is going to be different for the chemical industry than it is for the metal fabrication industry and any other industry.” It is for this reason that the industry has shifted towards identifying and employing customized methods to suit its products and organizational goals.
Why should you seek the assistance of PM tools?
Aligning processes and production methods with the organization’s overall policies entails a need for careful study and analysis and extensive knowledge in the disciplines of product design and development. The time-consuming traditional procedures must be replaced and the organization should climb up to the new arena to see how things are done with ease and in time. The need for assistance of specialized simple project management software to attend to such needs can never be overemphasized.
Reasons to bet on PM methods:
1. An Intelligent assistant
One of the fundamental principles in the study of scientific management is the principle of “Control by Exception.” It is based on this simple assumption: “If you try to control (manage) everything, you’ll end up controlling nothing.” Having an intelligent assistant to take care of everyday operations and attaining better cost control by efficient management of purchase and production can help you focus on your key areas of business development.
2. Testing and Retesting
How do you know if your product delivers the intended utility to your customer? You try it on yourself! Prototyping and iterating on various models to attain perfection eats up a lot of costly finance. The simulations offered by CAD allow the producers to test their model in the computer by applying real-world scenarios and seeing how it works before actually making a completed unit.
3. Quantity, Quality, and EconomyManufacturers thrive on economies of scale and scope. Having the right materials ready to commence and carry production seamlessly and at the right quantities requires constant care on the SCM (Supply Chain Management). This can be accomplished by project management in manufacturing. To keep the production running without unnecessary breaks and hurdles, and to minimize the cost of materials, they should employ costing techniques like Standard Costing and EOQ (Economic Order Quantity). Manufacturing project management software offers various reports and means to plan and align the SCM with financial budgets.
4. Bureaucracy & Law: The quicksandBureaucracy was designed to make things work efficiently and effectively; now it’s the other way around. There is a funny tale told by Ross Perot, a board member of General Motors, “At General Motors, if you see a snake, the first thing you do is to hire a consultant on snakes. Then you get together a committee on snakes, and you discuss it for a couple of years. And the most likely course of action is nothing.”
The point is, more often than not, the system seems broken. The lack of awareness of the law, coupled with bureaucratic behavior faced by the organization both internally and externally renders it brain-dead. A system-driven mechanism needs to be implemented to pull out these human flaws and unnecessary drags.
5. Market and Marketing
There is an old saying that goes “No matter how good you are, you can always be replaced.” Being in demand is something that every organization should constantly care about, and for that, the organization should be updated and keep itself young. Learning and adopting new technologies and testing them on the existing production lines, reviewing and redesigning production methods are all facilitated by digital media platforms. Manufacturing project management software assists the manufacturers to regularly keep up with the rising trends in the industry.
Embracing the digital wave is the ideal solution for the “now” and for the “tomorrow.” PM solutions offer a wide array of services for industrialists to streamline their operations by facilitating an end-to-end integration of design and production. The world is taking itself into the future at a quicker than ever pace, and employing the necessary digital tools increases your chance to lead the revolution in your industry.
Author Bio
David Miller is a technical writer, his works are regularly published in various papers and top-notch portals. His rich experience in project management software helps him offer latest and fresh
perspective on improved efficiency in workflows across organizations. His informative works
on similar lines can be viewed on ProProfs Project.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidmiller4312/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/davidmiller4312
Get one-on-one help from a manufacturing expert. We’d love to speak with you.
