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Daily planning: does the staff fit the machine time?
In production where people set up and look after several machines — injection moulding, for example — tomorrow's plan decides productivity. Too many staff cost money, too few push setups back. Daily planning makes this visible every day.
What it is about
On the planning day, the next production day is planned: which machines get a setup, who is in which shift, how much machine time can be expected? From this follows whether the scheduled staff fits the machine time.
The day after, actuals are recorded and the day is briefly reviewed. Recurring deviations turn into measures.
Two figures
It never measures against someone else's number, only against your own plant. Whether a Kmix of 2.5 is good depends on the product mix — so the yardstick is the average of your own previous year.
- Kmix (production mix coefficient): how many machine hours there are per staff hour. Higher means the same crew looks after more machine time.
- DLP (direct labour productivity): the deviation from your own level of the previous year, in hours. Positive means the machine time carries more staff than scheduled; negative means there are more staff than it needs.
The daily routine
- 1
Plan
Load setup plan and shift plan, check attendance, spot setup conflicts in the Gantt. Next to it is the forecast for machine time and DLP — with a recommendation in words.
- 2
Record
The day after, enter machine hours and order time from host computer and time recording. The forecast learns from this.
- 3
Close
Four guiding questions on staff, setups, machine time and execution, each yes or deviation with a comment, closed with a short code.
- 4
Act
When a pattern shows on several days, the tool proposes a measure and tracks it with owner and due date.
Starting without a year of data
- From day 1: setup plan, attendance, Gantt and setup conflicts.
- With totals from time recording and operating hours of a past period there is a yardstick right away — one quarter is enough.
- Without historic data, the tool fixes the yardstick after the first recorded weeks.
- The forecast gets more accurate with every recorded day.
Where the data comes from
- Excel exports from SAP, ARBURG ALS, MPDV HYDRA or any other table — map the columns once, then every import reads the same.
- Names from the shift plan are not stored, only short codes. Sick leave and holidays become “absent”.
- Direct interfaces to host computers are planned.
Daily planning is running as a pilot
It is currently being tried out in an injection moulding plant. If you want to use it in your plant, get in touch — we will put you on the list and let you know as soon as it is available.