Many industrial companies ignore their hidden factory or, in other words, the great room for improvement they have when it comes to boosting their production capacity. In this article, we explain what this phenomenon consists of, what causes it and how it can slow down the competitiveness and operational efficiency of your organization.
If industrial companies hope to fully leverage the production capacity of their factories, they must keep everything in the production process that has a negative impact on the efficiency and quality of their operations under control.
Most organizations believe they know the source of failures, errors, or waste that take place in their production plants. However, very few take into account that, behind these situations, other types of causes are usually hidden that go completely unnoticed by managers and that cause some companies to waste up to 40% of their production potential.
Popularized by Armand V. Feigenbaum in the 1970s, the concept of the hidden factory refers to the productive capacity that a company can unlock without having to invest additional resources. To achieve this, industrial organizations must focus their attention on their equipment and unmask:
- Schedule losses: time that production could be running but is not scheduled.
- Loss of availability: time when production should be running, but teams are idle.
- Performance losses: time that production is running, but not as fast as planned.
- Loss of quality: time when production is underway, but one or more units are defective. In some cases, this takes extra time and resources to reprocess the parts that are not OK.
Stable production processes: the basis of Lean Manufacturing
To get the most out of your factory’s production capacity and lay the foundations for Lean Manufacturing in your industrial company, you need to ensure the stability of your production processes. In turn, this is only achieved if you control all the variations in the equipment down to the millimeter, both visible ones and those hidden from view.
For example, a breakdown can be caused by various causes that are difficult to detect and to which no attention has been paid before the problem occurred: overheating, wear, vibration, abnormal noise, oxidation, dirt, contamination, etc. All these abnormal situations result in the accelerated deterioration of the mechanisms and components of the machines, a phenomenon that shortens the life of the equipment, increases the number of breakdowns in the factory and prevents the company from maximizing its productive capacity.
It is a totally antagonistic approach to the one proposed by the Lean Manufacturing management philosophy, which advocates the elimination of variations and is committed to the natural deterioration of equipment and the possibility of making reliable predictions about a machine’s useful life.
Technologies that unmask the hidden factory and maximize operational efficiency
Industry 4.0 provides companies with several tools to attack the hidden factory problem. The main one is the MES system (Manufacturing Execution System), a platform perfectly aligned with the Lean Manufacturing methodology, which allows companies to go beyond corrective actions.
MES solutions like Mapex instantly and automatically detect the hidden causes of scheduling, availability, performance and quality losses that hold back the competitiveness of industrial organizations. Thanks to the MES, production processes have stabilized and companies can have greater operational efficiency.
Specifically, the Mapex platform helps our customers to extract and analyze the data generated in their production plants; to control all production processes thoroughly and in real time; to identify and correct faults or any anomalies; and to make the right decisions, thereby increasing long-term profits.
Contact our team of professionals to find out how much improvement potential is behind your hidden factory and how we can unlock it with the implementation of our MES system.
