Understanding the Basics of manufacturing | Fundamental of Manufacturing Basics – assembly | steps | manufacture
Understanding the Basics of manufacturing | Fundamental of Manufacturing Basics
The words make, manufacture, produce and assemble all mean basically the same thing. You’re transforming components and raw materials, your inputs, into higher value products, your outputs.
And no matter what you’re making, there are four things that you need to pay close attention to: safety, efficiency, capacity and quality. First and foremost, you need to make sure that people are safe when they’re doing their jobs. That means creating an environment where there’s minimal risk of sudden injuries like someone tripping, falling or getting burned or shocked. And you also need to protect people from injuries that are the result of long-term exposure to hazards like loud noises, hazardous materials or radiation.
Sometimes you can make a work environment safe through engineering and design. But other times, you need to have people use personal protective equipment. Common examples of the PPE you might find in a factory are safety glasses, earplugs and steel toe shoes. Now let’s talk about efficiency. We measure the efficiency of a process by dividing an output by an input. For example, we could divide the number of products we have made in a week by the number of hours worked that week.
That would be a measurement of productivity or how efficiently the time was used. Next, you need to look at the capacity of a manufacturing process. Every machine and every process has a limit to how much it can produce. That’s the capacity. When you divide the amount that was actually produced, the output, by the capacity of a process, you get a percentage that’s called your capacity utilization.
The goal for any manufacturing process is usually to get both your efficiency and your capacity utilization as high as possible. Last but certainly not least, you need to look at quality. In order to use or sell something that you’ve made, it needs to meet the standards and specifications of your customers.
Quality problems lead to defective or substandard products that you can’t sell. You might need to rework them which will add cost and reduce your efficiency or you might need to discount them which will reduce your profits or you might need to scrap them which means you’ve wasted some of your capacity making something you couldn’t sell. Those sorts of problems add up and are called the cost of poor quality.
Manufacturing plays a critical role in supply chains. And when you’re preparing for your manufacturing shopfloor, you’ll want to understand the basics of safety, efficiency, capacity and quality.