Every business owner dreams of his company growing from the very beginning. This dream often includes providing more income, more jobs, more products on a large scale. The challenge is, however, how do you get from the prototyping and start-up phase to this stage? Often it is not one big order or big change in the market, but a steady growth of the business. How do you manage this growth without breaking what works about the business?
Many business owners start with great people who have been selected for their shared interest and vision for what the business can be. These initial employees use their expertise and experience to create the product and the methods and processes needed to provide it in the initial stages. This process often allows the company to produce the new product with handmade skill and quality. This method can sometimes be taught to others to increase the output of the company to feed initial sales.
But what happens when these volumes exceed the capacity of the current resources to keep up? One of the things that allow a start-up business to adapt and meet the market needs is their agility and flexibility in producing the product. As the demand grows, sometimes doubling or tripling in a short time, the methods and processes that were used initially can’t keep up. How does a business owner prepare and overcome this welcome challenge without sacrificing product quality and yet meet these new volume requirements?
The first thought is always, hire more people to do what they are doing to increase volume. However, this method of growth falls short of multiplying the production capacity and can continue to rely on finding top talent to be able to produce product in this environment. This presents a two-fold problem. First, finding these individuals and duplicating a process dependent on high skill levels is difficult to do. Second, even if you can add this talent to your workforce, what do you do when it grows again? The cost of scaling the workforce with highly skilled talent outweighs the benefit of increasing capacity in most cases.
The best way to scale your capacity is first to understand the steps needed to produce the product.
This is often done through ‘process mapping,’ a technique to list out the detailed steps and document the processes used in producing the product. This allows a highly skilled individual to identify what is done to produce the product and communicate it to others who may be less skilled in developing the process but perfectly capable of executing a well-documented process. This step can also identify areas of unnecessary effort and aid it improving or making a process more efficient. These efficiency and productivity gains can be the solution to increasing volume without having to double or triple the workforce needed to grow the business.
As a part of mapping the system processes and identifying each resource’s capacity, production output or throughput can be measured at certain process inputs and outputs.
These measurements are used to ‘baseline’ the outputs of the various stages. Once these measures are established, they can be used to report improvements in efficiency and thus throughput. When measures are expressed as a ratio of output per unit of measures, such as units per hour or something similar, they become performance indicators.
Once the process is mapped, measured, and documented, the key contributors to production throughput can be identified.
These ‘Key Performance Indicators are the most significant measures of performance and can be a great means of communicating success to the team and to establish improvement goals and targets.
Another means of increasing volumes is setting up parallel production elements to improve capacity and throughput. Often there are one or more processes that take the most time or resources that pace the rest of the operations. Understanding and identifying the process steps above is the first step in increasing your operational output. The next step is to identify the capacity of each operation and determine where the bottlenecks might be. These bottlenecks, or operations with the least output per period, drive the ‘Flow’ of your production operations. Sometimes finding ways to increase the capacity of these flow limiting functions can be a multiplier for production throughput. Are there ways to improve the efficiency of these flow-limiting operations?
Can parallel operational elements be put in place to increase the production throughput? Once the overall production flow or capacity is known, the overall process steps can be optimized to meet increased production demand.
Once the production process has been documented, process step throughput is defined, and KPIs put in place, it is time to evaluate the documentation available to build the product.
Is the documentation complete?
Are all details included in drawings, process steps, and quality requirements? When increasing the pace and volume of operations, it is well worth the time and resource investment to ensure that the supporting documentation will produce a consistent result over a broader range of skill levels. Initial production processes sometimes leave out what the experts might consider ‘common sense’ items that are not clearly understood by the expanded resource pool. These simple, step-by-step descriptions of the production process are key to achieving scale and increasing output. By including detailed step-by-step instructions, production output and quality are more consistent and predictable.
Part of the equation for increasing production volumes in training human resources in the established processes and equipment needed to produce the output. This can be general skills training as well as specific training in the company’s process flow, documentation, and measurements. This step can also train multiple resources on different process steps to provide flexibility of production resources, and production needs change. This also includes backup for much-needed vacations and time off for production resources. One of the most valuable resources in increasing production output is the people performing the operations. This is typically the best source of process improvement recommendations. Having a documented process map, key performance measures in place recommended improvements can be tested to see if they truly improve the output while maintaining the required quality. By implementing these incremental changes into the production process, the full impacts of changes can be measured, and new processes and methods can be implemented with predictable results.
This measured implementation of improvements is collectively known as ‘continuous improvement’ and can lead to better production output and competitive advantage.
Regardless of where you are increasing your production throughput and output, these steps can be applied. Process maps are intended to be updated as new steps are refined or unnecessary steps are removed. Key Performance Measures are tools for communicating production process performance and quickly identifying areas of the issue when these KPIs indicate a decrease in production output or quality. Thorough documentation of design details and process steps can continue to evolve as improvements are made. All of these are essential to growing and training the human resources necessary to grow your business volumes, throughput, and output.
