Quality time with friends and family is important. Life bombards us with demands and distractions. When reacting to daily problems, it is easy to let entire weeks go by before realizing how things have slipped.

Things get away from us when we don’t keep our focus.

In the manufacturing world, production plans and budgets can quickly derail into a messy situation.

Production is not a fixed constant. It moves and changes each day, and there are specific reasons for that at your company.

The word that describes this is called “variability”, and it can appear in many forms.

• Raw materials differ by season, supplier & others.
• Processes vary in temperature, pressure & others.
• Machines wear and behave differently over time.
• Experienced workers adapt quicker than others.

Successful people know the key to a great day is to prepare from the start and to work through the day with intent. Doing so, we can maximize our time and clearly address the obstacles that stand in our way.

Fortunately, this translates well in the manufacturing world. There is a way to track and quantify the impact of this by using the Efficiency Metric.

The entire process can be measured in terms of time. Partially disposed batches, kickoffs dropping into buckets, and rework are all examples of wasted time.

When these seemingly disparate issues are normalized to the same scope of machine usage, each can be monitored and compared to one another.