I'm struggling with the cases like "optimizing the bottlenecks, increasing the outputs" with a given process. Especially cant figure how to structure these type of cases. .Can you plz help me, any ideas?
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Hello!
One of the ways is to consider throughput as Equipment availability (hours a year) * Actual production rate (units / hours). Then you split availability into calendar time and time losses. You split losses into categories and analyse priority ones. Same for productivity: you look for max productivity (e.g. best shifts, or nameplate capacity…) and its losses and address them.
Hope it helps.
Aleksis
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Hi,
There are several types of operational cases that you may have:
1) Operational math problems. (e.g. Should we increase the speed of the elevator or just buy a second one? How should we reduce the queues? How should we increase the output of a factory?).
Structuring:
- Usually, you have to look at the process (value chain). Even the most complicated systems have the inflows and outflows
The key concepts that you have to learn:
- Capacity and utilization (both machine and people)
- Cycle time, Throughput time, Little's Law
- How the does lowest cycle time influence the production? (Lead time = cycle time of the slowest process)
- How can we mitigate the bottlenecks with low cycle time? (Buffer, Parallel process, speeding up)
2) Cost cutting cases
Structuring:
- What is the cost composition and what are the biggest costs
- Benchmarking of the biggest costs to find the improvement potential
- Process improvements to meet the benchmarks
- Costs and benefits of the proposed initiatives
The key concepts that you have to learn:
- Internal / external benchmarking
- Idle time
- Core processes (usually are optimized) and the supporting processes (usually are cut)
- Math structures (Frequency of operations * time per operation)
- Other useful structures (e.g. people - process - technology)
Feel free to reach me for further help with these cases.
Best!
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