Tips on Being an Effective Plant Manager

In the challenging world of business, manufacturing, food processing, and various other industries where plant managers play a key role we know this role is under new and additional challenges. Plant managers will be faced with such challenges as assets being more flexible for product changes, increasing the capacity of existing assets, finding more expeditious ways of bringing new assets into the plant, starting them up, and integrating them with existing processes. Demand creation is bound to play a more prominent role for many plant managers.

If you want to be an effective plant manager, you need to be knowledgeable of and provide balanced focus among each of the five areas addressed by the speakers at PAF 2011: safety, quality, productivity, stewardship, and demand creation. Each area brings its own need for skills and experience. Yet each area is intertwined with the other. You can’t touch productivity without affecting quality, safety, maintenance, or demand. And there are some basic principles and best practices that are common for executing programs in each of the areas.

SAFETY

Plant managers should ensure that their safety culture includes safety processes that begin when new machines are being specified and continue on throughout a machine’s lifetime. Shea recommends that purchasing specifications reference the applicable standards, that buyers be upfront about the skills of their workforce, and that the operating conditions and expectations be fully disclosed. With these items on the table, a task-based risk assessment should be completed before a machine design is approved. Get complete and full documentation that covers all of the aspects of the machine, not just the electrical systems.

QUALITY

Quality is the process of producing products that meet specifications. It is but one of three elements of Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE), the other two being uptime and rate. It is fair to say that we cannot produce quality without measurement. We may either measure to ensure that our processes are in control and thus infer that product quality is achieved, or we may measure product attributes directly to ensure quality. Product attributes may be measured in-line, near-line, or off-line in a laboratory. Typical hybrid manufacturing/packaging operations perform a combination of all of these to insure product quality.

PRODUCTIVITY

Productivity involves performing within or improving upon the budgetary boundaries that have been established for an operation. Productivity will depend upon the efficient use of labor, energy, and material and is thus affected by all three components in the OEE equation. Several of the presenters at PAF drilled down into the details of their internal programs for driving productivity.

STEWARDSHIP

Michel laid out the seven laws of ARM, which in summary are: 1) document 100% of all work done by operators or mechanics; 2) develop detailed plans, including kitted parts, by skilled maintenance planners; 3) create a master preventive maintenance schedule based upon conditions, not time; 4) integrate preventive maintenance scheduling with the master production schedule to ensure execution; 5) log all parts out of inventory to specific pieces of equipment; 6) train and certify all mechanics in the critical skills needed; and 7) maintain plans to address the top 5 equipment issues and the top 5 structural down time issues for every line in the plant.

DEMAND CREATION

Many plant managers will try to avoid participating in demand creation activities, which are frequently disruptive to manufacturing. But if we don’t create demand for and within our own plants, someone else will create demand for their plant at our expense.

Plant managers will be faced with the three-fold challenge of making existing assets more flexible for product changes, increasing the capacity of existing assets, and finding more expeditious ways of bringing new assets into the plant, starting them up, and integrating them with existing processes. Demand creation is bound to play a more prominent role for many plant managers.