Many manufacturers, warehouses, and distribution centers play a crucial role in the supply chain, and increasing throughput and productivity is essential for their success. For businesses to thrive, they must implement strategies and technologies that optimize operations and streamline processes.

Adopting cutting-edge automation technologies can significantly enhance efficiency, accuracy, and productivity. These advancements improve the speed and accuracy of order fulfillment and enable businesses to handle larger volumes of inventory and meet the ever-increasing demands of the modern market.

Six top ways to increase throughput 

1. Review Your Existing Workflow – The first place to start when trying to increase throughput is to review your existing workflow. Do you have the correct number of employees for your operations? Do you have productivity data, velocity data, time analysis, process flows, SKU data, department tasks and flows, and more? (Optimization) Where are your pain points? Do you have a mapped process and structure?
2. Eliminate Bottlenecks – Have you worked on creating new streamlined processes to keep up with product demand or changes in the industry? Have you updated the equipment being used in your operations today?
3. Reduce Equipment Downtime – Is your current vendor providing the correct material handling equipment for your changing operation? How often does your equipment have issues? How is the material handling vendor’s customer support and response time? How often do they perform preventative maintenance? If you perform your own preventive care, how often? What shift or downtime period are they being completed?
4. Reduce Parts Rejection Rate – Have you investigated your parts rejection data? Have you thought of how you can improve that number? Could you have an elite team who can show you how to decrease that number significantly? Ask yourself, how much money are we wasting as a company to remanufacture and reprocess?
5. Improve Employee Training – How often do you train your employees? Do you offer cross-training to your staff members to keep productivity flowing in all departments? Do you shadow your staff and see where improvements can be made to make them more efficient?
6. Use Factory Automation – Once we have tackled the top five on the list, we introduce you to automation. This is an area many companies are leaning towards because they can’t find/retain quality employees and have learned that people don’t do well over time with laborious, mundane tasks. Automation is not for every company but should be introduced and discussed. Automation can outperform humans in terms of precision and the ability to work at consistent high speed.

Higher throughput and productivity are attainable

I know I’ve asked many questions in each of these categories, but it’s something management should ask to enhance their business. Who are the players in the industry that can assist with growing your company to the next level year after year?

Our RLM team at Abel Womack has been working continuously with our customers to help in the above mentioned areas. They are trained in TPS (Toyota Production Systems) and will help you optimize before you automate. Please reach out to us to learn more.

Additional reading: How to Achieve Greater Operational Efficiencies with Lean Management