Technology Ranks as the Top Opportunity

The greatest operations opportunity today for manufacturers is in applying technology as part of a continuous process to improve methods. That's the findings of Tompkins Associates Inc. (Raleigh, N.C.), a research firm that recently polled industry experts to identify the top 10 operations opportunities today. Among the technologies cited by the respondents were: computerized maintenance management systems, manufacturing execution systems, bar coding, and warehouse management systems. Opportunities for continuous improvement include: preventive/predictive maintenance, planning and scheduling maintenance operations, simplified work flow, crossdocking, improved inventory management, paper flow simplification and outsourcing.

The rest of the top ten opportunities are:

2) Facilities/Space Utilization: The capacity of facilities and the flow through these facilities - be they production operations, maintenance storeroom, raw material storage, work-in-process storage, finished goods storage, or distribution - are all viewed as offering tremendous opportunities for improvement. Facility consolidation, contraction and expansion all have significant potential depending upon the circumstances.

3) Strategic Issues: The strategic topics of vision, mission, organizational alignment, capacity, breadth of product offerings, flexibility, modularity, measurement and reporting systems, internal benchmarking, and the overall process for creating and sustaining peak performance offer major opportunities for improvement.

4) Response Time: Speed and reaction time throughout an organization present a tremendous opportunity for improvement. Production lead times, purchasing lead times, set-up times, new product-to-market lead times, customer response times, order fill response times and in-transit times are all critical.

5) People/Team Development: In maintenance, the topics are craft skill development, operator-based maintenance and teams for continuous improvement. Throughout production and distribution, the topics of employee involvement, empowerment, leadership, communications, rewards and recognition, and the teaming process have the greatest opportunity in harnessing the energy of change that is occurring throughout operations.

6) Customer Service: Similar to all the other issues, there is nowhere in the organization that customer service is not viewed as critical. Both internal customer service and external customer service are viewed as a tremendous opportunity for improvement. Be it a maintenance manager talking about equipment uptime, a production manager discussing meeting customer needs, or a distribution manager discussing order fill rates, all agree that customer service is a key topic for operational success.

7) Quality: Product quality and information quality are equally critical success factors across all operational sectors. The need for ISO 9000 certification and the follow-through to exceed customer expectations is a mandate that has been accepted as a given.

8) Cost Reduction: With a keen sense of reality and the strong awareness of people involvement, all operational elements are working on doing more with less. The simplification, streamlining and focusing of resources to get the job done at a minimal cost are seen not as something that has been done, but something that needs to be done.

9) Inventory Reduction: Although much progress has been made, there exists very little acceptance of current inventory levels. Operations management believes that major opportunities still exist to reduce inventories while still achieving high levels of customer satisfaction.

10) Productivity: Productivity enhancements will come from unleashing the power of people and allowing them a greater opportunity in designing their work procedures, as opposed to the more traditional top-down productivity enhancements.

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