Garment manufacturing is considered as easy process compared to other businesses. But you know that how difficult it is to maintain certain level of performance and controlling things in production floor. Most of the factories are working with multiple software and spreadsheets; enter same data to different reports. You might push hard developing a best system through training, expert guidance those would not sustain if you don’t have necessary tools. I will show you examples below.
For more than two years I am working with a real time solution provider and implemented this system in numbers garment factories. Through data analysis, I observed many real statistical figures of production floor those can’t be measured correctly without having such systems. If you are looking for sustainable growth, want to get control over your production floor, you must go for real time solutions.
Before you jump for searching a real time system for your factory, read 7 reasons why I think installation of such costly (most people think so) solution is beneficial for your factory and employees.
1. Line balancing
How do you balance your sewing lines after loading a style? Are you happy with balancing a line using pitch diagram and capacity study? Or frustrated? An imbalanced line makes your line efficiency and productivity worse than anything else. Is there any good tool than real time line balancing tool? I think no. Real time system collects production data from each workstation and system generate live line balancing graphs on real time. These graphs would help you to find bottleneck operations, alarms you about how many pieces operators can make by the day. System can also show you the alternatives (operators) to improve bottleneck operations and meet the daily production target. This system helps you for quick decision making.
2. Skill matrix
Being a production guy or Industrial Engineer you know why an operator skill-matrix is important to a factory. Preparation of skill matrix is not an easy task if you use conventional method. Secondly, you need to update your skill matrix in regular basis. You test operators in different machines though most of the operators will work on the same machines most of the time. When it comes using of skill matrix, you select operators from charts of skill matrix, but not sure about operator’s latest performance level.
When you use real time system, operator skill-matrix gets updated automatically. Even you can check operator efficiency level in all operations they did earlier. No hard work at all.
3. Incentive scheme for sewing operators
One most effective way to increase productivity of a factory is motivating sewing operators through performance based incentive system. You can make a nice incentive scheme for your operators and collect required data manually. But it would not be nice work for incentive calculation for individual operators and keeping operators happy. Calculation of incentive earning by individual/group using manual system is not sustainable. Secondly, there would be limitation in designing multiple incentive schemes together. A real time system can solve all these issue related to performance based incentive schemes. You just need to set your incentive calculation parameters and system will give you incentive earning reports daily, weekly and monthly.
4. Quality data tracking
Probably you collect quality performance data from inline and end of the line (off-line) inspection. First thing – it is very difficult job for collecting defects/defective pieces and secondly later you need to involve extra person for data entering to computer and analyze quality data. The main point is – when you get to know the quality issues in the line, it get delayed to fix the issue. A real time system can show you quality reports quicker with information such as operations from where defect generates and who sews the defective component.
5. Non-productive time
Time lost once is gone forever. You might not know or get such analysis how many hours in a week you are losing due to non-productive work (lost time). You can’t even believe the non-productive time may be upto 25% of your total production time (From one of my analysis). If you can’t measure off-standard time, you are really losing lot of productivity improvement potential.
27 weeks study of on-standard and off-standard hours of line line making woven garments (small and medium size orders)
6. Order tracking:
Everyone needs the status report of an order. Merchants, production planning guy, marketing person and factory managers, even buyers need to know the order status any time during the day. All of them get busy with phone for getting updates from production team and make production team busy in collecting data making report with so many stories and problems. Do you know how much time get wasted on report making? A real time system generates order status report automatically and everyone can check order status by their own from anywhere with internet connection.
One common production report production by hour for lines can be displayed through system.
7. Automated MIS reporting:
Making report on excel sheet is never an easy task. In the morning while everyone to spend few minutes just for thinking how to spend the day, what jobs need to be completed, few HODs, IE guy heads on the computer screen and starting punching data for production reports, WIP reports, costing etc. And a manual report comes with many errors. Data entry for MIS reports can be eliminated by using a real time system.
Most real time systems don’t have all the above solutions in a single system. But Leadtec system designed to provide you solutions for above mentioned problems. In your opinion, are there any other systems that can provide us such benefits?
