The full potential of your assets

Utilization metrics help manufacturers find improvement opportunities

By Kenneth Gram

Typically, production managers, industrial engineers and lean practitioners are responsible for designing a shop to suit the demands of their organization’s customer. Ideally, design must be done before purchasing a building to ensure that the space suits the product; however, in reality, customer requirements change, operations have been in a building for years with changing deliverables, or bad habits form, resulting in a redesign of operations. A major aerospace corporation uses a set of asset utilization metrics that indicate how effectively it uses its assets. Assets include not only machines, but allocated building space and workstations, among other things.