Baan/LN Tip of the Week: Top 10 Survival Tips For Manufacturers
by Guy Morgan / IndustryWeek
Under intense cost pressures, quality is at risk at many manufacturers. These 10 tips can help you survive the competitive challenges ahead.
Maintain your focus. Make a decision about the kind of company you are and stick with it. - Reinvent your products regularly. Suppliers who sharply differentiate their products fare the best.
- Maximize your productivity and increase your speed through enhanced product and process design. Lean manufacturing focuses on production and its associated costs from a component's conception.
- Pay attention to your supply chain. You must know about any risks, financial or otherwise, that threaten your suppliers.
- Offshoring vs Onshoring. You must know the total cost of products.
- Improve quality. There are still too many manufacturers delivering components with high defect rates.
- Diversify your customer base. This may involve segmenting your industry or going outside it.
Embrace globalization. Acquisitions, consolidations and diversification can help suppliers achieve economies of scale. - Invest in your employees. Suppliers who paid higher wages and made bigger investments in training and equipment came through the downturn better than those who didn't.
- Facilitate total productive maintenance. While this concept has been around for decades, some manufacturers are still not training machine operators to perform many of the day-to-day tasks of simple maintenance and fault-finding.
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