All companies need production strategies: documents that tell them how they're going to organize their resources and meet customer needs. Unfortunately, a lot of firms don't have a systematic approach to this issue. Instead, they adopt ad-hoc methods, fixing things when they break, without an overall strategy.
Going into business blind is a bad idea. All companies need some kind of framework that they can use to ensure that they deploy resources effectively.
In this post, we take a look at some production strategies you absolutely need in your enterprise. Check them out below:
Forecast The Market
If you're a supply chain company, you need to be able to forecast the market. You need to know where demand is heading to adjust your product mix and ensure sufficient inventory space.
Most companies are still using old-fashioned spreadsheets, but these are hopelessly inadequate. Specialist software is a much better option. It provides advanced multivariate forecasting models using the data inputs that tell you whether you can supply or not.
Set Up Input Delivery
Your people and capital might be ready to meet the demands of the market, but your suppliers might not be. And that's a problem.
Setting up input delivery is vital. You need to know when vital supplies will arrive to organize production and manage your operations effectively.
Simple improvements in your suppliers, for instance, can help improve reliability and business uptime. Getting fuel in a box delivery instead of using expensive carriers, for instance, can help you keep construction vehicles supplied throughout the day without any time-consuming off-site trips.
Providing suppliers with forecast information can also help substantially. Letting them know ahead of time about what you can need can help a great deal.
Standardize Your Processes
When it comes to their processes, some companies are all over the place. What's more, sometimes they don't even realize that there's a problem. Non-standard processes are the way they've always done things, so why change now.
Standardizing processes is the surest way to improve productivity and get your production on track. Start by mapping out what needs to happen to deliver a specific product. Then start working backward from there, auditing how people in your firm actually get the job done. You'll usually find a significant difference between “best practices” and what's happening on the ground.
Communicate Your Plan To Key Stakeholders
While you might have a plan in your head, it's not much use until other people are on board. Communicating your ideas with your team will help get everyone on the same page and adjust their expectations.
Where possible, try to sell your ideas to your team. Talk about how the improvements you're making will help them do their work more efficiently without the same headaches. Talk about things like upgrading ordering processing systems, better databases and software, and overhead visual representations of workflows for busy factories or construction sites.
Once you get production strategies right, you'll find that the entire ethos of your team changes.