How Many Devices Can You Manufacture in a Day?

I have been presenting and educating about lean manufacturing principles in O&P for many years now. During the question and answer discussions that usually follow my presentations, I continue to come across questions related to manufacturing that are shared by many companies in our industry.

One of these questions is, "How many items can a technician, or can my company, produce in a day?" When I ask the same question of my audience, most who answer do not really know how much they can manufacture in a day. They can only provide best-guess answers. That's fine. It's actually a loaded question because many of them don't know an exact answer. I use it primarily to start a discussion.

The problem with not knowing is if you do not understand your manufacturing capacity, you are running your production blind.

Let's break this statement down a bit more.

If you do not understand your capacity and manufacturing resources, you cannot manage a production schedule efficiently and smoothly. You cannot communicate clearly with the clinical staff, the office staff, and the patients regarding when a device will be done. It all becomes a best-guess scenario-one that may be inaccurate and full of issues.

I often see technical schedules that are operating under the "do whatever it takes" approach. This type of schedule is also commonly called "firefighting," which means the technical department is working on the most pressing device or issue- basically putting out fires.

Doing whatever it takes, putting out fires-whatever name it's given-is exhausting. It will work from time to time, but it is riddled with many costly side effects, such as pressuring suppliers to deliver parts quicker than their stated turnaround times, spending more for expedited shipping, increasing staff resources devoted to the job, rescheduling patients, and, the most common issue, authorizing and demanding more overtime to meet the delivery expectations. The net result is employee burnout and apathy.

This example should be the exception to meet the deadline for one job in one day. However, it's likely this is the schedule not only for today, but for tomorrow, the day after, and next week-then repeat.

The putting-out-fires method is costing you more than you know.

So how do you address this method of managing production? In its simplest form, you can't manage what you can't see. So you make what you do visible.

In order to run a production schedule smoothly, you need to understand a few simple facts about your manufacturing process.

1. How many hours are available in your day?
2. What are your current manufacturing resources?
3. How long, on average, does it take to make an item or device?
4. Is there an up-to-date system to manage the information visually?

Establish Available Hours per Day

Look at your total workday hours and subtract any nonproduction time, such as lunches, breaks, and scheduled meetings. The remaining time represents workday hours available for producing items. It is normally less than eight hours.

Establish Capacity

Take the available time and apply it to your technical workforce. For example, if you have five technicians on staff and each is available to work seven hours a day, you have 35 hours of available manufacturing time for one day.

Establish Average Manufacturing Times for Each Device

Most technicians and managers know the average time it takes to manufacture a particular device, but they have not put it down on paper. Review the various devices you manufacture with your group. Discuss the manufacturing process and typical time allotment needed to complete each device, and agree on a starting point.

Don't get caught up in getting a perfect estimate for each device. It will always be a moving target. Remember, in this industry we manufacture standard items with high variable content. Estimate the times as close as possible and adjust as needed.

Once you have a time allotment to apply to a device and a person who represents a block of time out of the day, you now have the ability to put together a schedule that you can see and manage.

Create a Visual Schedule-Management Board

A schedule-management board can be as simple or as detailed as you want. The important thing is that it is visible and everyone in the facility can see it at all times. The visual scheduling board is the heart of the production operations.

You need a couple of core pieces of information on the schedule board for it to work.

1. The employee's name.
2. A representation of the workday and sometimes a week or more.
3. A breakdown of available hours

This is an image of one of Fabtech's scheduling boards. Fabtech uses color-coding, a two-week calendar spread, scheduling of routine nonproduction time items, employee identification, and for fun, personalized icons. There is much more going on here than meets the eye, and it's all available at a glance.

Our schedule board is the culmination of 15 years of development, and it displays a lot of information. It is also a constant work in progress to meet our ever-changing needs.

We use a 4-foot by 8-foot white board and Velcro tags. These Velcro tags are movable information pieces related to the schedule. The board has a section for each technician, and each section is broken down into half-hour increments for the day. You can see a two-week date spread, meaning you can schedule out two weeks and no more. Most of our scheduling does not go past a two- to three-day window because we manufacture items in a one-piece flow system. However, as you move forward, you can see your completed history for the week at a glance.

Your schedule board can be whatever you need it to be. It just needs to address these three fundamental pieces of information.

How Do You Use This Information?

Now that you understand your available hours, your available manpower, and your standard times and have a place to record it, you can start to schedule.

This is an image of some of the nonproduction time tags. Each tag represents something that has to happen, and they represent the actual time block to complete the duty.

As work comes in you can evaluate it by the hours needed to accomplish the job and your available man-hours. You can now place this information in a visible setting for all members of the company to see. If 40 hours of work are on the board, due in one day, everyone who views the schedule will be able to discern two things. One, your capacity for that day is full, and, two, five hours of overtime are required to accomplish the work.

I understand there are many more demands on production that happen during the day. The point is that you now have a visual representation of your available time, jobs to be done, work in progress, and completed items. You now can manage your production because you have visibility. The visual schedule gives you a tool to answer the following basic questions, plus many more.

1. Are we meeting delivery?
2. Can we meet delivery?
3. Do we have capacity to make the device or deliver it by the scheduled date?
4. How many devices can we make?
5. Overtime, or no overtime?

Most importantly, the visual schedule allows you to have educated, unemotional discussions with your staff to solve potential issues surrounding the fabrication scheduling.

Greg Mattson, CPA, CPTO, president and CEO of Fabtech Systems, Everett, Washington, has been a technical lecturer at numerous O&P industry conferences and seminars.