That’s right. Conventionally, mill directors and superintendents use volume to assess the success of production runs. While it’s an important metric, the final volume only tells you that similar runs don’t yield the same. It gives you no indication as to why and even less about how to improve the situation. It’s a little bit like your mill is a magician’s top hat: you put something in, but you have no idea what’ll pop out (you hope, a bunny rabbit).
More often than not, plant floor workers are blamed which is not exactly fair because they are—to this day—usually very ill-equipped to fix the problems they’re blamed for. This is a recipe for frustration at every level and it fixes nothing.
To be of use to management and sales and operations, KPIs must be derived from a clear strategy, that is itself derived from clear objectives. Once you have those, it’s much easier to use the KPIs that will support your strategy—at the management and plant floor levels.
Most of you know that high technology, the industrial internet of things (IIoT), and Industry 4.0 (just to throw out a few buzzwords) offer opportunities to better understand your business—as long as you’re looking at the right information.
A good portion of managers and decision makers in the mill (taking advantage of the data that can be collected from the different pieces of equipment) don’t derive the proper results and focus on details instead of looking at the big picture.
For example, while they are important to understanding efficiency and availability, downtimes do not play a very important role in what production runs yield, because they are bottlenecks, not constraints. Controlling bottlenecks is important but minimizing the impact of constraints that persistently limit throughput is more important because constraints are responsible for the variations in output volumes / FBM.
Further, beyond being available, data must be actionable. In manufacturing organizations such as wood transformation plants where communication is usually top-down, directives are always reactions to past states that may or may not still exist.
Through years of experience, we’ve noticed that only by synchronizing the information needed by management with the information needed by plant-floor staff to act can plants improve operational efficiency (on average 20 %) and the value of the product mix out of the plant as much as 33 %.
