The lingering effects of the COVID-19 outbreak in China have left many of our clients scrambling to make up for lost production. Projection runs that were meant to begin in March are now delayed until late May. While companies can adapt to production delays, the rush to make up for lost time has other casualties: Cost and Quality. As it stands, Chinese factories are already understaffed and overworked. A rush to make up for lost production is likely to cause a decline in quality, and costs usually rise as factories use overtime and other methods to drive output.
To add to the difficulty, travelling to China is extremely difficult as many countries in both Europe and North America have heavily restricted travel. Under these circumstances, many companies are coming to CMC asking how they can monitor the situation in China and receive their products as quickly as possible.
CMC’s ‘Production Expediting Service’
With COVID-19 showing no signs of slowing down anytime soon, we have expanded our services to include a production expediting service. CMC will work with factories to help ensure your project is on schedule and your suppliers deliver. The objectives are to get the products to market as needed and to bring normality back to production while keeping costs low and quality high. Our comprehensive expediting services will help you achieve quick turnarounds, enabling your production to be resumed back to normal as soon as possible.
Our expediting services cover the following:
- Understanding and, if needed, diversifying sources of materials
- Setting up planning systems so that operators always have something to work on (mainly by preventing unexpected material shortages)
- Improved workforce efficiency to compensate for staff shortages
- Eliminating unnecessary batch & queue production for a leaner model
- Shortening equipment setup time and complexity, increasing changeover efficiency
- Increasing equipment up-time by setting up preventive maintenance
- Emphasizing and achieving higher first-time quality
If you are unsure of whether you require our assistance, ask your suppliers what their current recovery plans are. Our experience, however, is that only a few suppliers have a recovery plan; others try to work harder and quicker.
The slowdown will eventually work itself out, but when that happens is anyone’s guess. It could be within 3 months or it could take the rest of the year. Each day of production delays and poor quality is expensive. In that case, putting together a recovery plan using CMC’s expediting services can be your best bet for returning production to normal.
Looking to improve your factory's output quality while lowering costs at the same time? Click on the image below.
