Food manufacturers are subject to an array of recurrent errors. Most of the time, these mistakes aren’t industry-specific, and they display the capacity to rear themselves in businesses of all sizes. The problem with a mistake-prone food production plant is that the continual presence of unnecessary errors almost always translates to a significant loss of production.
A culture of accepting persistent human errors at your plant is a problem that can quickly spread across your entire organization and stifle any plans for future success. While it is virtually impossible to eliminate all manners of error, there are several remedies that manufacturers who struggle with productivity issues and mistakes should be capitalizing on right now.
In this article, we take a detailed look at several common mistakes that food manufacturers battle and what steps your organization can take to mitigate them. If you follow just a few suggestions in this post, you should see both your business culture and workplace productivity improve.
1. Failing to plan for unexpected downtime
Under Murphy’s Law, anything that can go wrong will go wrong. The expression is just another way of mentioning that you can’t assume things will always work, even if you believe that you’re reasonably prepared and have all your bases covered. The good news is that there are resources available to reduce the odds of something going seriously wrong at your plant after an operator mistake.
Industrial automation solutions from EZ help food and beverage manufacturing companies like yours gain further insight into plant-floor variances in real-time. The instant access to valuable production information lets you tackle problems as they immediately arise. You start making process improvements right away, before the issue snowballs and causes disruptions to your manufacturing lines.
2. Expecting everything to run on time
Failure to plan for system downtime is one thing, but it’s even more come for manufacturers to miscalculate the number of routine delays they encounter in a given week. Very few factories run perfectly all the time.
The best strategy for combating lost time is to not put yourself in a position of getting behind before your even begin. Starting yourself off behind the eight ball every time because you failed to budget your schedule for common hangups and delays will only cause more disruptions at your plant.
If manufacturers adjust for routine scheduling delays that occur frequently through their processes, there are in a better position to make decisions and modify their schedules in advance, pursuant to historical demand expectations. Too many food production plants import workflows that are too ridged. Non-negotiable production programs like these make it difficult to change your schedules after even a minor delay.
3. Not emphasizing plant traceability and visibility
Poor planning at the floor level usually results in less than superior manufacturing plant traceability and visibility. Constantly working from behind poses several significant obstacles. Delivering on time is a challenge, not to mention critical business tasks like enterprise resource planning and digital transformation initiatives.
Poor visibility into your operations disadvantages your supply chain just as much as it does your organization. Industrial automation solutions and manufacturing productivity software for the food and beverage processing industries help you understand where and when you typically encounter delays so your scheduling department can account for them.
Automation software for food manufacturers gives you the visibility needed to develop a coherent path for delivering your products as committed. You can use the additional insight to pinpoint common problem areas causing delays to making process improvements as you progress.
4. Not buying-in
A failure to buy into a culture that builds reliable data to implement process improvements always starts at the executive level. Too many season professionals are fixated on outmoded industry protocols that only set them behind their competition. Companies need to establish a culture that fosters continual learning and self-improvement to remain effective.
Organizations that don’t initiate the modifications necessary to keep their operations up to date risk their operators taking things into things into their own hands to boost efficiency. Trying to make improvements without the support and authorized approval of management can invite more complications, while unapproved decisions jeopardize workplace safety.
5. No meaningful continuing education initiative
You can attribute another reason organizations fail to buy in to a lack of suitable knowledge about their objectives. This is an easy mistake to correct, but it will take some effort to design a routine training and education program that actually improves employee awareness and skills.
Even if you can’t support a robust training program at the moment, you should maintain a detailed guide that discusses how to train new hires. But in general, ongoing company educational training programs boost company morale. Conferences and groups represent a great opportunity to elevate staff confidence and solicit employee feedback concerning process improvements.
It’s never too late to improve
When constantly you’re battling corporate cultural problems and confusion over how to establish performance expectations on the plant floor, you can’t expect success. Business culture impacts manufacturing environments perhaps more than any other industry. But there’s no reason to fret when automation software can quickly put yourself on the path to eliminating mistakes after you adopt reliable process control solutions from EZSoft.
Our methodology incorporates ControlBuilder to provide you with software solutions that are significantly more efficient than other more conventional approaches to systems and software development for the manufacturing industry. Industry-leading software from EZSoft helps manufacturers reduce production downtime while increasing productivity through scalable, affordable industrial automation solutions for food manufacturers.
If you’re struggling with a plant that’s not as efficient as it could be and find yourself unsure, asking yourself how to locate industrial automation companies near me, reach out to the warehouse efficiency and automation experts at EZSoft today.
Call us now at (484) 568-5040. Or, feel free to fill out our online request for contact form, and we’ll have a dedicated client relationship manager get back to you right away.
