What is Shop Floor Management & Why is it Important?

Manufacturing is more sophisticated today than ever. Between employee mistakes, equipment breaks, late shipping, and rush orders, there are too many moving parts. Without proper planning, mistakes are bound to happen.

With the evolving production landscape, smart manufacturers are quickly adopting the latest business process optimization strategies and shop floor management is perhaps the single most important on that list.

The Definition of Shop Floor Management

A shop floor is an area where assembly or production is carried out. This could either be done manually by the workforce or through advanced automated systems.

Shop floor management can then be defined as management at the point where things happen. Managers and production employees meet daily at this place of value creation to carefully analyze the equipment, inventory, storage, and manufacturing processes in order to identify any disturbances or deviations in the value-added processes — and to initiate countermeasures where necessary.

These daily meetings, more commonly known as the shop floor management meetings, are an integral part of the management process.

Shop Floor Management Objectives

An ideal shop floor management plan must take into consideration the following objectives:

• Ensure proper routing of materials on the shop floor
• Channelize the processes and procedures on the shop floor effectively
• Schedule materials, workforce, other resources, and operations
• Locate and patch any loopholes in communication
• Monitor for any deviations from standard procedures and processes, and correct them swiftly

Benefits of Shop Floor Management

Organizations that handle shop floor management properly start to experience numerous benefits in their production and assembly lines. That’s because avoiding problems and handling them efficiently is far easier with proven plans in place.

To truly understand the impact of shop floor management, organizations need to consider the following benefits:

Fewer Errors

The right shop floor management allows for the smooth and swift flow of information, with real-time communication achievable by utilizing IIoT solutions.

Thanks to the swift and transparent communication, the production manager and other key decision-makers can stay up to date on the ground operations and have complete control over the supply chain.

As a result, identifying and optimizing any problematic areas becomes a part of the routine, leading to a significant drop in errors and robust execution of standard procedures and processes.

Reduction of waste and overhead costs

As the production cycles start running smoothly, organizations instantly experience a decline in wastage and overhead — and, consequently, an uptick in profitability.

That is made possible thanks to the drop in errors and an overall boost in productivity at each step of production.

Time savings

As project managers get automated access to key supply chain data in real-time through a floor management dashboard, they can make data-backed decisions in record times.

As a result, project managers can save valuable time and use it to focus on other core activities. This naturally leads to a boost in other areas on top of the optimized shop floor management.

If you would like to learn more about how shop floor management can transform your manufacturing process, please get in touch with us today.

Discover more about Shop Floor Management in our new blog article “Why Shopfloor Management is necessary and important”. In this article, we take a close look at the shop floor management.