Renaud Anjoran

With all the buzz about manufacturing moving to Vietnam, people tend to lose sight of the fundamental truths when it comes to labor productivity and production management. At CMC, we've heard several manufacturing managers comment that "Five workers in Vietnam are needed to do what gets done in China by three workers." However, we believe there is another way to look at it.

Why do many Lean improvement projects fail to achieve their objectives? In good part, because the organization is held back by old habits and poor practices.

We wrote a few weeks ago about the most common types of internal failures in manufacturing, their impact for the manufacturer, and how simple software can be used as a preventive measure. Manufacturing managers tend to ask the same question on this topic: "How can this new approach help cut costs?" 

We'll be covering this question in our blog post today.

One of the questions we get asked most often by Chinese-owned manufacturers is, “can you help us with our automation strategy?” And the first thing we ask them is, how mature are your maintenance systems?

Do you feel the need for external support to improve your China operations? Good news, many companies are competing for your RMBs. The first question you should ask yourself is, ‘what type of manufacturing consultant/trainer do we need?’

In this article, I divided them into 6 categories. The most common categories are listed first, and those more seldom found come last.

Running a 5S program on the shop floor, and then re-running it at a regular interval, is one of the basic initiatives any factory can tackle in order to improve its performance. It is also one of the bases of good preventive maintenance. Let's explore why a 5S program can produce great results in Chinese factories here...

Factories in China are seldom perfect, having fairly common issues, for example, 'quality fade,' or a lack of a production planning system.

While working with consultants who can come in and help fix your factory on site is a great way to improve operations, what if you're just looking for factory improvement ideas in order to handle this in house right now?

CMC's manufacturing consultants often need to explain the differences between breakdown maintenance and preventive maintenance in a manufacturing setting. Let’s take 2 extreme examples, in other contexts, to make it very clear...

This Auto factory paint workshop case study demonstrates in detail how CMC's Partner, David Collins, made savings of almost $3 million per year on paint & rework in a US Auto factory in his former role as senior manager at Dodge.

If your factory has invested substantial amounts in equipment, the controller probably wants to see if those machines & tools are used often for a productive purpose.

That’s the whole logic behind the indicator called overall equipment effectiveness (OEE).