Any chief manager who can count money understands that an enterprise based on manual labor brings a lot of expenses, not high level of quality and serious risks connected with a constant searching for appropriate specialists. That’s why such a kind of business process optimization as manual labor mechanization should be a continual process.
How to choose operations which need manual labor mechanization
Manual labor mechanization is not always economically feasible. In order to choose business processes to optimize by means of automation, you should base upon the following criteria:
- The percentage of defective goods. Many enterprises produce goods which are really difficult to assemble. The price of a mistake is very high. Due to defective products, an enterprise can lose up to 30% of production volume. And it is almost impossible to lower the percentage of defective goods without such a way of business process optimization as manual labor mechanization. Mechanization can lower this index to 5%.
- Procedure duration. Production of goods should be effective enough. And the speed of production depends not only on machinery or materials but also on employees. In order to check employee effectiveness, it is necessary to provide calculations where the correlation of the volume of goods produced and the time spent on it is defined. Those procedures which take the longest period should be the subject to business process optimization.
It is obvious that not every procedure should be automated. In order to assess the necessity of this action, you should calculate profitability of changes.
Basing upon the experience of many enterprises, here are some pieces of advice how to lower the part of manual labor at the enterprise:
- Assess labor costs on production of one certain kind of goods. To do that, divide the whole process on procedures;
- Describe all procedures and calculate time expenses on their implementation;
- Calculate the cost of each procedure and choose the most expensive ones;
- Find ways of their cost-cutting.
In order to reduce the share of manual labor, you should provide the diagnostics of the equipment and the analysis of all processes.
End product and equipment diagnostics
Implementing these procedures, it is very important to take into consideration the following criteria:
- Productiveness;
- Reliability;
- Quality.
Sometimes when providing of the diagnostics specialists find some extra criteria. Usually they are connected with special characteristics of production and raw materials.
Reducing of the number of employees participating in one procedure
Optimization of business processes where manual labor is used can be reached by combining of manual and automated activities. Appropriate way of manual labor mechanization can help to enlarge the volume of production without enlarging of the number of employees of the enterprise.