It is normal that on the shop floor, the first-hour production is less than the day's hourly production. If you look at your hourly production report, you will realize this.
It may be due to some standard minutes being wasted by each operator setting up the workplace, the unavailability of inventory to sew, waiting for the work, and warm-up time for each sewing operator.
All of these are genuine reasons.
Knowing all these facts, one engineer is
trying to improve the production in his factory's first and last hours.
This question is to all the garment industry experts and engineers: How can garment factories increase the production of the first and last hour?
Your suggestions will be valuable to many factories. It is also true that whatever one does, we can not achieve the same production quantity in the first hour as we get in the 3-6 hours of the shift. But you can surely improve the production rate from the present level of production.
My suggestions to him: To improve the current production rate in the first hour, eliminate the root causes of less production in the first hour.
- Keep enough WIP for each operator to start the operator the next morning. At least keeping enough WIP at the last operation of the style (line output operation)
- Machine cleaning and workplace setup should be done before first-hour starting
- Tracking and monitoring all operators start their work on time. To manage this, garment factories can use technology solutions.
- Developing SOPs for maintaining inventory for each workplace, raw materials (including threads, needle, fresh cuttings, etc.)
- Automation in the sewing process can improve first-hour production. (Still, garment manufacturing is labor-intensive, and secondly, there is not enough automation for sewing operations.)
Management of the employees, production floor, and workplace can improve performance. I am looking for suggestions and comments from readers on this.
Read readers comments
Suggestions from Ashokpal Sathiyanathan, Industrial Engineering Manager at Lenny Fashions Limited (29/06/2020 via LinkedIn)
- Make sure previous day operator balancing which are planned leaves, and unplanned leaves covered by Line floaters/multi-skill operators
- The sewing operator checks the quality of 1st pieces stitched in the machine related to any defects, like oil stains/ poor stitch quality. It avoids unnecessary lose due to quality.
- Additionally, we can't focus on all operations in 1st hour...mainly IE / Prod mgmt team ensured the bottleneck operations we had poorly performed yesterday, and we already found an action plan to overcome the next day. May CRITICAL operation.
- The previous day all production-related issues MUST ( MC breakdown/ quality challenges) found the solution with a proper action plan with a responsible person, before leaving the shift.
- HR/ Prod mgmt alert on latecomers? Make proper counseling and understand the importance of 1st-hour production for the day
- Implement the incentive system which boosts of 1st hour production
Related posts:
How to Reduce Bucket Loss During Style Changeover
How to Calculate Hourly and Daily Target When Line Works at 45% & 60% Efficiency?