Throughput is the most important metric in manufacturing. It is the amount of goods that are produced within a set amount of time. Each machine in a production plant has its own throughput rate, which contributes to the overall plant’s throughput. This can be hard to track and challenging to improve, but with adequate methods and technology, it can be done.
Once time, investment, and effort has been put into improving your company’s throughput, this can result in great positive impacts such as:
Impact of Improved Throughput 1 - Reducing Downtime
Satisfied customers: more output means more sales, if your business has the demand. By increasing efficiency and reducing downtime, you have more items to ship to customers that keep shelves stocked with your products. This translates into happy customers that consume your product whenever they need to.
Impact of Improved Throughput 2 - Improved Profitability
Larger profit: more sales means more profit. Increasing efficiency and throughput lets you perform timely deliveries that meet set quotas and turn into profit when products are sold.
Impact of Improved Throughput 3 - Competitive Advantage
Keeping competitive advantage: by performing timely deliveries that translate into sales, you will have your spot assured in the market. If your throughput is better than your competitors, this will give you a competitive advantage over them. Customers want timely deliveries and plenty of options.
Impact of Improved Throughput 4 - Production Efficiency
Efficient production: as it may be understood by now, a higher throughput mean your machines are using time more efficiently. An efficient production process means you are performing as near to capacity as you can. This means that less time and money is spent in machinery downtime and restarts.
Impact of Improved Throughput 5 - Balanced Manpower
Reduced waste and balanced manpower: increasing throughput reduces waste. For example, when there is a high throughput and low downtimes, operators will be doing work most of the time which eliminates labor waste.
Impact of Improved Throughput 6 - Lower Facility Costs
Improved throughput means that you are getting the most out of your machinery and factory space. Idle machines have a capital cost but they also cost money in space, whether that is costing in rent or real estate taxes, or the energy costs of lighting and heating or cooling the space they are in.
Impact of Improved Throughput 7 - Reduced Energy Consumption
Investing in real-time technology that tracks production, will provide you with detailed information into the machinery’s performance. This information will provide insight into efficiency and energy consumption, which will help when planning on ways to cut on energy bills.
Therefore, as throughput improves, energy waste decreases. Real-time monitoring can help in reducing overproduction and downtimes, which turn into energy savings. A final and important aspect on this type of technology is how it contributes to operators’ work and lessens the negative effects of labor shortage. Having technology that works alongside humans and helps them by collecting production data will require less human effort. Since this type of technology is able to represent current and historical data in visual graphics, operators can focus on just analyzing the data and other types of activities. This technology performs a lot of the tedious calculations many workers are needed for, so it can make up for any labor shortage. IIoT Smart Factory Analytics technology reduces the amount of workforce needed and boosts efficiency, just what is needed when a company lacks manpower.
To learn more about how technology can help you to reach your critical production KPIs, sign up for a demo below!
