Measuring Manufacturing Productivity

Abstract

Whether manufacturing 2D or 3D printed products, the press itself is one of your largest investments; improving your Return-on- Investment is one of your key goals. For many presses, the ROI is predicated on producing hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars worth of output. An increase of just a few percent would have a very significant impact on ROI. The industry has heretofore been satisfied with merely tracking job flow. Historically, identifying the obstacles to improving press productivity, utilization, and ROI has relied on anecdotal information; real information – quantitative press productivity data – has not been available.Recognizing the problem, we focused upon the lack of data identifying the bottlenecks. One fundamental breakthrough was realizing that only press operators on the shop floor know much of the needed information. The information must be acquired in a minimally invasive manner, categorized, aggregated, analyzed, and presented as metrics that support and facilitate identification of the real obstacles and bottlenecks.We will describe and demonstrate a new, patent-pending methodology and system that actually measures productivity of any press or other output-producing machine over time. This is not another printing MIS system; rather, it highlights bottlenecks and opportunities for productivity improvement. Implemented with today's state-of-the-art technologies, the system incorporates touchscreen, tablet-based data collection GUI, cloud-based data storage and analysis, and browser-based anytime, anywhere graphical dashboard and reporting.