If you run a manufacturing company, you likely understand on a personal level just how much optimization is important. Optimization isn’t just what allows you to meet your manufacturing deadlines and quotas, either. For many businesses, optimization can be the difference between competing with your larger competitors or falling behind.
Since optimization is so important for manufacturing companies, the next logical question is how to perform this sort of optimization. Especially if you’re a smaller business, certain tools and solutions won’t be as effective for your work as they would be for larger companies. Here are a few different ways to optimize small or even mid-sized manufacturing companies.
Get your team aligned with your key priorities
While a lot of people think about optimization in terms of tools and equipment, it’s just as important that your team is working as efficiently as possible, too. Part of that involves ensuring that every member of your team understands what their role is and what’s expected of them in order to meet the needs of your company. One way to ensure that your team is aligned across all departments is to use an OKR framework, which stands for objectives and key results.
The objectives and key results methodology can help businesses clearly define their goals and what steps need to be taken in order to meet those goals. For example, you’d start by coming up with an objective that’s important to your company, which would be expressed clearly in terms of what the accomplishment is and why it’s important. From there, you’d define your key results, which help offer specific, measurable outcomes for reaching that objective. Different OKR platforms even offer OKR graphics and analytics to help you and your team measure progress towards certain goals.
Outsource tasks that take up too much time internally.
Another way to optimize your business is to remove tasks that take up too much time. Think about your human resources department, which has a lot on its plate between hiring, training, and managing various employee programs. All of these tasks require human intervention, however, another important part of a human resources department involves managing payroll. Obviously, payroll is important to keep your employees happy, but it isn’t necessarily the kind of task that requires the insight of your HR department to run properly.
One way to address this issue is to outsource the task of managing payroll to another company. Online check printing companies make it easy to handle various financial tasks your company faces, freeing up your employees to focus on other aspects of their workweek that require more expertise. The end result allows you to have a more productive HR department without needing to spend money hiring more team members.
Pick the right equipment to help you manufacture.
While equipment isn’t the only factor in how quickly and efficiently you can produce the goods that your business specializes in, it certainly can make a difference. Especially if you’re in a highly-specialized field, such as pharmaceuticals or supplement manufacturing, having the right equipment might even be crucial to you getting the proper endorsements and following federal manufacturing regulations.
Mini conveyor belts are the perfect example of this since they’re far more appropriate to use in some situations than others. Part of this just comes down to their size and weight limitations: obviously, with belt widths reaching a maximum of only 10 inches, there are some tasks that you won’t be able to perform with a mini conveyor built. By that same token, however, there are some situations where a smaller conveyor belt makes much more sense than a larger one, especially if optimizing how much space you have is part of how you want to optimize your manufacturing business.
