GUEST OPINION: It pays to make sure you’re making the most of what you already have before you drop big bucks on new equipment or hiring more labour
Is acquiring technology for automation on your agenda for the new year? For many Australian manufacturers, the answer is yes.
It’s a move that’s being actively encouraged by governments, both state and federal, as part of their collective push to support the local manufacturing sector’s continuing decline.
And it makes sound sense, given this transformative technology has the potential to solve several challenges simultaneously. Smartly deployed, it can help businesses combat the high production costs that have driven hundreds of local operators offshore or out of business over the past three decades.
Automation can also provide a partial solution to the skills shortages and gaps which are a persistent challenge for many manufacturers, particularly in regional areas.
Enhancing the appeal of automation systems is the fact they’ve become more affordable than they were a decade or two ago. Once the exclusive preserve of multinational manufacturers, they’re now in reach for small and medium sized players.
An essential investment?
If your existing lines are at or near capacity, or you’ve secured a sizeable contract and need to ramp up your output, commissioning new automation technology can be a sensible move.
But it can also be an expensive one. Depending on the complexity of the operation, the degree of automation, the scale of the line and the nature of your business, you could well be looking at a seven-figure outlay.
Yes, it’s an investment in your business’s future growth but it could also be money you don’t need to spend, at least not just yet.
It may be possible for you to increase your output sufficiently using the equipment you already have, if you optimise your processes and implement efficiencies.
Finding out what’s happening on the factory floor
Doing so starts with conducting a thorough audit of your production process. That means documenting the uptimes and downtimes of each of your machines, and their individual outputs, on a weekly, daily and shift-by-shift basis.
If you’ve not conducted this exercise before, there’s every chance you’ll detect some anomalies, and they could be significant ones. A night shift team that regularly turns out far less product than their daytime counterparts, for example, could be skewing your view of what’s possible. So could machines that have the potential to become more productive if they’re optimised or upgraded.
Understanding and addressing issues like these can boost your production capacity, perhaps to the point that the purchase of new equipment can be deferred until you grow your order book some more.
This can also be an opportunity to put other production-adjacent processes under the microscope. Doing so will allow you to see where efforts are being duplicated, and where you can automate repetitive activities and tasks.
Obtaining these insights can, however, be challenging for manufacturers that are operating in manual or semi-manual mode, with limited visibility into their operations.
Tools to help you take control
That’s where cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) software has a vital role to play.
Implementing a solution that’s been developed with the unique requirements of the manufacturing industry in mind can help you gain greater insight into what’s happening on your factory floor, on each and every shift.
Ideally, you’ll choose a platform that can aggregate all your operational and production data into a ‘single source of truth’, one which provides you with complete visibility into the production process and an accurate picture of all your jobs.
Being able to draw on that up-to-date repository of insights will allow you to gauge if your factory is at or near capacity and make informed decisions about whether and when to invest in new plant and equipment.
Setting your manufacturing business up for a bigger brighter future
Automated production equipment can support productivity and growth but it’s an expensive outlay. Invest in an ERP platform with manufacturing automation technology that allows you to maintain a bird’s eye view of your production process, while optimising low-value tasks through automation. This enables you to see where you should be investing in your business once your existing resources are truly at capacity.
If operating smartly and cost effectively matters to you, it’s mission critical software that can help you achieve those aims.