Do You Feel Stuck between a ‘Rock and a Hard Place’? Are Rising Costs Diminishing your Bottom Line Profits?

Instant, prioritised information, giving you end of end visibility of your production processes, can help you to reduce your transformation costs and improve your net profit

Manufacturers of packaged goods everywhere are facing the same dilemma of rising input prices; raw materials, energy prices, increased labour rates, with little or no opportunity to pass on these rising costs to their supermarket customers, who are themselves fighting a price war with other supermarkets.

Even if you are fortunate enough to be increasing your sales turnover, with this exponential rise in transformation costs (cost of sales), your bottom-line profit must be under constant attack.

With no opportunity to pass on these rising transformation costs, the only place for manufacturers to look is internally, to reduce their own cost of sales by reducing wastage, improving efficiencies and increasing ‘right first time’ production procedures. In order to achieve this, it becomes essential to examine production processes, from goods-in to dispatch, so as to identify areas of added and lost value, to streamline these processes and reduce costs at every opportunity.

Direct Transformation Costs from Inputs to Outputs

Did you know that by reducing your ‘end to end transformation costs’ by a mere 1% could double or triple your net profit?

Harford Control have spent the past 40 years listening to their clients and developing an MES system which helps them do exactly that, and never has it been as important as it is today to implement these changes within the production process.

You might be very clear on what you want to achieve during the coming year, but do you have total visibility of production operations, in real time? You might personally be blessed with 20:20 vision, but unless you can see precisely what is happening right now, within your production operations, then it is hard to see how you can expect to achieve your objectives.

The well-worn phrase ‘You cannot improve what you don’t measure’ could also include
‘You can’t improve what you can’t see’

Real time visibility of factory floor operations has now become an essential performance improvement enabler on the road to Operational Excellence.

Sustained Continuous Improvement

Fortunately, the use of the Harford MES system throughout the continuous improvement process, makes stagnation and deterioration totally impossible, without the management team becoming instantly aware of this from the PC on their desk, computer tablet or mobile phone, wherever they are. They can find out instantly without leaving their offices, the current performance status of all their local and remote production lines, timely enough to take action before it’s too late, and ensuring that goods sent out, stay out.

Real-time information, instantly displayed across integrated networks and also constantly displayed upon large TV screens in the production area, means that the whole operational team, from top floor to shop floor, see the same information and have the same opportunity to make improvements in real time. Actions based upon real time information mean no more guesswork.

Instant Visibility Is Essential

Even where companies cannot afford or justify a full commitment to automation, they must, as a bare minimum, begin to see instant visibility as a pre-requisite to performance improvement and optimisation. Where in the past, companies may well have costed a product and added in a safety margin to cover mistakes, this is no longer viable.

Paper Recording Limits Performance Improvement Opportunities

This means that they must, at the very least, deploy systems which are not paper dependent, (as they carry little or no discipline, and no instant visibility), in order to be able to present immediately to the whole team both when mistakes occur and also to show performance improvement opportunities that can be instantly acted upon.

As there is, for many companies, such a significant level of wastage contained within the conversion process from raw materials to despatch, to implement a paperless system with such visibility should provide rapid and cost-effective improvements, such that no new money is required. The right system for the right application would therefore be financed from the existing cost of wastage, already normalised and sustained within the conversion process of many manual systems.

Systemisation is therefore absolutely essential for any company seriously intent upon minimisation of risk, minimisation of wastage and maximisation of Right First Time, at lowest manufactured cost.

Harford MES helps factories eliminate risk, reduce wastage and improve efficiency by turning data into instantly actionable information.

Find out how by contacting us today: www.www.harfordcontrol.com +44(0)1225 764461