Identifying your Facility’s Limiting Factor through Production Planning Software

Every manufacturing facility manager is familiar with the Theory of Constraints: the idea that every factory is limited by one factor in its fabrication process. For many industrial engineers and managers, identifying and eliminating this limiting factor is the key to improving production and profits for their company.

Why Limiting Factors are a Big Deal

A common issue with identifying a facility’s limiting factor is the lack of objective data. This leads to each department citing different limiting factors. Depending on the company culture, these groups can use limiting factor discussions to blame other departments, cite perceived errors and problems without data to back up these claims, and/or waste time and money analyzing factors with little to no effect on the capabilities of a particular production line.

What a management team needs is hard, unbiased data that can be critically analyzed.  This data needs to include a variety of factors, not just the standard BOM analysis that is performed on many traditional factory production lines.  Experienced managers know that there is much more to determining a limiting factor than simply analyzing the raw materials and timing the production line.

Getting the Most Out of Your Reports

Production planning software is capable of analyzing a wide variety of factors that can affect the outcome of a factory line. Detailed reports listing the efficiency of each employee and workstation can help to determine if the limiting factor is related to a personnel issue. Material usage and waste reports will give exact amounts of each material and part used in the fabrication of an item, helping to determine if the limiting factor is related to a materials issue. Maintenance logs can provide hard data about the downtime of each line; they detail routine cleanings and maintenance as well as breakdowns and equipment failures.

Of course, limiting factors are not limited to the activity on the production line. Often, the largest factor delaying a shipment of product to the client occurs away from the factory floor.  Fortunately, production planning software is able to control, schedule, and collect data from every part of the production process. The speed and accuracy of the orders placed are recorded and monitored. In fact, the software is capable of giving customer orders an immediate place in the production schedule, eliminating the need for each order to be manually reviewed and submitted to the fabrication facility. As product is produced, the software monitors the status of each item. Finally, the software optimizes the shipping schedule, ensuring that no product spends too much time in storage or in transit before reaching the customer.

Production planning software not only generates reports for each department, production line, facility, and item in a company, but it also uses this data to optimize every step. That gives a manager the ability to instantly see data from all parts of his or her company. With these reports, identifying the limiting factor is simply a matter of analyzing the data; it eliminates the guesswork. Once the limiting factor has been identified, it is possible to optimize every step of the production and fabrication process.

Are you curious to know more about how production planning software can help you determine your facility’s limiting factor? Read our blog on the Theory of Constraints and learn more about the technicalities that go into our processes.