Covid 19: How Hard Can you Push Before the Wheels Come off?

Winners push their limits by analyzing and producing a steady stream of high-value improvement opportunities and then quickly exploiting them to save money and time.  Push too hard without these opportunities and the wheels come off as you pass process limits, greatly reduced by Covid-19.  Don’t push hard enough and you lose to more capable competitors.

The systemic approach highlighted in this article has been applied numerous times on costly, asset-intensive enterprise processes, e.g. engineering development & test, manufacturing,  doubling, and even quadrupling utilization rates.

Systematically Surface, Value and Prioritize Opportunities

Pushing operations hard without clear opportunities that are “real” guarantees a wreck.  You need to know where to look.  In asset-intensive environments, one of the most valuable sources of improvement to speed and efficiency is 1) leveraging the assets you already own, and 2) not wasting investment dollars on acquiring assets that won’t be “high-value” utilized. This is something asset management databases are not well equipped to handle. They are designed to track assets, not systematically identify waste associated with those assets.

Analyze Equipment with “High-Value Use” vs. “Low-Value Waste” so You Know Where to Push

Asset utilization reporting must represent the truth and all too often it doesn’t. In many environments, it’s not measured at all but assumed to be high because of the demand users claim they have for the equipment. They are likely hoarding it.   Often, measured utilization is reported “high” because the measure is often incomplete. For example, a unit under test arrives at a test station and so the clock for utilization is turned on even though the test station is not fully set-up and prepared to test yet. This often counts as utilization because the test station is, at this point, unavailable for any other use. Your asset management system must report utilization practically.

Transform Low-Value Waste to High-Value Use

This process requires visibility into demand for your equipment and the readily available supply of equipment required to match the demand. Quickly matching known demand with newly freed-up equipment capacity results in the acceleration of schedules, efficient use of assets, and increasing returns on assets. The constant, relentless, and fact-based identification, production, and matching of available capacity with demand are critical.

Matching supply and demand require embedded knowledge about the assets, their availability, and changing schedules/demand for their use.  Minimum requirements include a searchable database that houses asset availability and demand, detailed performance specs (search screen shown below), options, availability, previous users and uses, maintenance, life cycle obsolescence data (shown in the pie chart below), a Pareto diagram of waste in the various enterprise processes (also shown below) and drill down details of all of the reports from which workflows can be triggered.

aEAM: Accelerated Enterprise Asset Management — Providing the Visibility You Need to Go Fast

Sente’s Scireo Enterprise Asset Management solution provides the high-resolution visibility you need to go fast and stay safe.  Windshield wipers provide the visibility needed to go faster and stay safe in your automobile.  Sente’s Accelerated Enterprise Asset Management provides this visibility with other knowledge and other best practice accelerators to assist your teams to get products to market faster and at a lower cost.

Scireo aEAM:  Asset Management Reimagined for today’s world — enabling teams managing and using asset-intensive processes to significantly increase speed (2X) and reduce costs (30# to 75%).   

See what visibility really looks like.