Research Reveals Plants are Flying Blind

My company will soon publish some startling research that we have
conducted with AMR Research about the use of metrics in food and
CPG plants.  What makes this research startling is that, in a
nutshell, an overwhelming majority of companies either do not have
proper plant metrics in place, or do not have enough confidence in
their metrics to use them for meaningful decision support.  In
other words, manufacturers are flying blind.

Since this blog is titled “The Power of the Plant
Floor” I bring up this topic because I believe that this dire
state of plant metrics is, indeed, a threat to the power of the
plant floor.  How can the plant floor have any impact on
improving operations if there are no reliable metrics that show
what it is doing?  

In the food sector specifically, margins have gotten squeezed by
rising commodity prices over the past 18 months.  More
recently, commodity prices are fluctuating up and down, and the
credit crunch and grave economic forecasts are causing the rules of
the game to change almost daily.  Without internal information
that managers and executives can trust, food companies will simply
not be able to navigate intelligently through all these
changes.

As a result, the majority of food and beverage producers —
the ones who are flying blind — are leaving money on the
factory floor at a time when no company can afford such a
loss.  The research reveals that an average of $1M per plant
per year can be added back to the bottom line, simply from seeing
where efficiency can be reclaimed and acting upon
it.    

The upcoming research, which I will elaborate on in future posts,
goes into detail about some simple and direct ways that food and
beverage producers must respond to current conditions by gaining
more visibility to — and appreciation of — the power of
the plant floor.