Data can be tricky. Often, we talk to manufacturers who get stuck in a place where they know their problems and where they are, but they can’t seem to improve and their OEE or downtime, for example, stays stuck.
This is because connecting to and uncovering your manufacturing data is only the first step. To turn those insights into improvements, you need two more key elements: continuous process improvement and effective organizational communication that establishes what your goals are, what the responsibilities are to achieve them, and who is accountable for them. This can be achieved through implementing a Daily Management System, or DMS, to both communicate and create structure. When you have this in place and it is working effectively, it’s a sign that your culture is fully embracing continuous improvement.
Ahead, we’ll take you through how these three components work together to create a culture and a methodology for manufacturing organizations to transform data into measurable gains.
Understanding continuous process improvement’s benefits
Continuous manufacturing process improvement is a principle, a methodology, and a cultural mindset of constantly seeking opportunities for ongoing, incremental improvements to processes, services, and products. When you adopt it, and especially when you pair it with production monitoring, you also foster an environment of accountability, growth, and action.
While many different facets make up continuous manufacturing process improvement, its central belief is that even the smallest adjustments can lead a manufacturer to significant results over time. This is true both when it comes to executing it in your operations and to building a culture of continuous improvement.
Embracing this principle encourages every member of your team, no matter their role, to engage in the process of improvement and work with the belief and understanding that every improvement matters, no matter how tiny.
Practically, this looks like proactively and continuously seeking opportunities to improve through regular performance analysis, problem and/or inefficiency identification, solution implementation, and success tracking and analysis. It’s also crucial to publicize wins amongst your team, so they can see how the improvements add up and their contributions make an impact.
Ultimately, continuous process improvement helps your company minimize waste and maximize efficiency, quality, and production capacity–which helps make your business more resilient and able to withstand, and even edge out, competition.
It also better enables you to pivot during disruptive events and adapt your operations as customer preferences evolve.
The importance of a Daily Management System (DMS)
Just as important as building a continuous improvement culture in your organization is the communication around it, which lends a structure that keeps it front of mind. A Daily Management System (DMS) does just that: it ensures your operations stay focused and on track toward your goals by communicating a structure for managing your day-to-day.
At Worximity, we use an adoption pyramid to set our manufacturing clients up for sustainable success with both production monitoring and continuous improvement.
Here’s what that looks like:
- Connect: At the base of the pyramid, we connect you to production monitoring data and optimize data collection for you, ensuring installation and data accuracy.
- Measure: Next, we establish measurement. This looks like standardizing metrics, ensuring employees have visibility and access to the right, most relevant data, and analyzing the root causes of losses and downtime.
- Improve: Continuous improvement and a Daily Management System work together at the top of the pyramid to implement a methodology for sustainable success and ongoing waste reduction and improvement.
A DMS harnesses the commitment to continuous improvement through a system that enables your team to know, daily, if you are on track to meet your goals, what corrective action is being taken, who is accountable for it, and if past actions and improvements are being maintained.
It builds habits of communication and action around establishing standards and plans, ensuring alignment across your organization, checking the initial plan against the actual action, problem-solving, and developing and coaching team members.
In short, it’s a system of daily actions that keeps your team focused on making improvements based on the insights identified from your data collection. The real-time data you get from production monitoring helps you assess where you’re losing efficiency, and what adjustments and metric goals to prioritize. Using this methodology helps you act on it, on an ongoing basis.
Customer Success Story - Arterra Wines Canada
One of the best ways to visualize how these three elements–production monitoring, continuous improvement, and a DMS–work together to transform data into measurable gains is through a success story from a real business. We’re going to take you through how we helped Arterra Wines identify the root cause of a significant downtime issue they were facing, then build a system to help them act and stay accountable to their plan for improvement.
Founded in 1874, Arterra Wines Canada is Canada’s leading producer and marketer of award-winning, globally recognized Canadian and imported wines. With more than 140 years of experience crafting and producing wine, the company has 10+ facilities in Canada and 1000+ employees.
Arterra’s goals in partnering with Worximity were to reduce costs, bring their ship capacity back under control, and unlock more capacity. Following significant changes in management and leadership, they also wanted to reset and implement a standard communication structure, improve supervisor communications, and then translate communications into daily management and production meetings.
At the Niagara site, Worximity was brought in to help. Arterra Niagara has four lines producing one million+ cases of wine. Some lines run 24 hours a day and others run 16 hours. Struggling with line performance and needing to inject some focus in some key areas, the Arterra Niagara team wanted to unlock some quick wins and bring in Worximity’s support to strengthen their internal Continuous Improvement team.
Worximity started by building their DMS structure:
- First, we restructured their daily meetings so they included fewer people, but ensured they were more involved in the processes.
- Then, we worked with them to develop a standard for the daily meeting topics, helping keep meetings focused and on track.
- This included getting more precise with data conversations. What we often see with clients is that when there is data overwhelm–too much data to consider–teams don’t do anything, but instead get lost in the data. We worked with Arterra Niagara to streamline their meetings to look at a maximum of three relevant KPIs.
- Another critical component to these daily meetings was to add the requirement that every time a KPI is in the red, there needs to be an action assigned.
- Next, we created an action log so they could make sure that for every action, there was somebody accountable and a due date assigned.
- We also worked with them to set a standard for these meetings that when prioritized problems are identified they are discussed every day and followed up on through resolution. For one problem, Arterra Niagara was able to isolate specific packaging types that would incur more downtime. Then, once they were able to predict the upcoming downtime, they were able to put in place countermeasures and dramatically reduce breakage.
We tracked this decrease in average downtime each month, which resulted in significant savings.
On partnering with Worximity to implement their DMS, Adam Fairman, Operations Manager at Arterra Wines, shared: “It’s been good to have a partner to help us create structure and develop some tracking tools for daily actions that focus in on reasons for missed goals. It keeps accountability.”
Arterra Niagara has also been able to automate shift reports, giving supervisors time back in day-to-day and making shift pass-offs much easier, ensuring they have standardized communication across all shifts.
Key takeaways
Once you ensure data accuracy and optimize your data collection, it takes regular, methodical action to see measurable gains.
Adopting a culture of continuous process improvement, where you are always looking for opportunities and consider every small adjustment, is a critical piece. Effective, organizational communication helps encourage its adoption and clarify goals and responsibilities. Implementing a daily management system ensures you’re collectively tracking goals, KPIs, and issues, and assigning accountability and actions to actively work through issues. It also keeps everyone on the same page, day in and day out.
When these three pieces of the adoption pyramid are all working together, you have a culture that has fully embraced continuous improvement. As a result, you also have a system that enables your organization to get unstuck from data overwhelm, and instead, transform data into measurable gains.
Listen to Adam Fairman, Operations Manager at Arterra Wines share his story in this webinar.
