Productivity Improvement Tool Development

Whether your organization manufactures widgets or provides services, competitive market forces require a continual evaluation of alternative operating strategies. Organizations that can quantify the impact of proposed strategies prior to their implementation have a distinct advantage in improving bottom-line performance. Empirical Solutions Corporation has developed several productivity improvement tools that allowed our clients to test alternatives prior to implementing them on the real system. Objectives of some of the projects performed include:

• To quantify throughput capability under varying market conditions and thus identify opportunities to reduce operating costs while increasing sales revenues
• To quantify capacity requirements based on variable demands.
• To quantify maintenance support levels required to minimize downtime losses under varying market conditions.
• To quantify buffer requirements that result in saturation of process bottlenecks.
• To identify optimum work teams required to maximize throughput under varying production schedules.

Interface Variables

Our productivity tools are developed with an Excel user-interface to facilitate alternative scenario testing. The interface includes input parameters that are directly read into the model, as well as output reports obtained from model performance measures. Typical variable inputs include:

• Production Schedule (manufacturing systems)
• Arrival Rates (service systems)
• Resource process times
• Failure rate
• Repair rate
• Reject probability
• In-process inventory capacity
• Changeover and/or set-up times

Output Reports

User’s vary input parameters, launch a scenario test and are provided with standard output reports without having to interface directly with the process model. The output reports provide a summary of the impact of the proposed intervention on key system performance measures and allow the user to quickly identify the bottleneck. Standard output reports include:

• Throughput summary tables
• Resource utilization statistics
• Inventory variability statistics
• Material handling utilization statistics
• Waiting times
• Response times