Creating Capacity

​

 

Whether your business is driven by people, equipment or a combination of both there are times when you wish you had a way of creating more capacity, fast enough to deal with peaks in production, demand, to become competitive in the market for a short term or to take advantage of a competitors flaw or mishap.

 

Unemployment rates keep plummeting and steep long learning curves for some of the most technical and specialized work make it critical to look into what is in house in order to release the most experienced, technical and hard to get capacity. From the asset point of view, you might believe your production lines are already running at a maximum capacity, and pushing them further will only jeopardize your business.

 

Companies are growing at an unseen speed, such growth at such pace puts a lot of pressure on some critical areas that may become bottlenecks and put at risk the very future of organizations, either by being unable to deliver on time or by creating delays that will have an impact in the organizations revenue an reputation on the street.

 

Usually when these situations become evident - even though it might be already too late - , the instruction is to throw resources at the problem to get it done and over with, this might temporarily solve the issue but it does not resolve the problem, the problem being that very frequently, entire areas have no idea of their maximum capacity , how to manage resources to get there or where they can be more flexible to be ready when there is a need or opportunity.

 

Training resources take time and when time is of an essence, it does not resolve the situation as it creates a vicious circle where you need experienced people to train and coach new hires, being time consuming for your experienced team.

 

When it comes to equipment, the acquirement and installation might just force you to let go on the potential business, due to your lack of capacity.

 

What to do then? Starting from the undeniable principal that every task, process and function has inefficiencies built into it, while some of them are obvious and can be dealt with rather quickly, the ones that are not can give you anywhere from 10 to 70% in additional capacity to do what is important.

 

Let’s go through a few of the things you might want to pay attention to when looking for the creation of much needed capacity:

 

On the people side you want to understand in detail how time is being spent, how many meetings are attended by how many people, for how long and the relevance of their involvement. As a principal, anyone who has no saying in the meeting and is given no actions to perform as a result of the discussion is someone who should not be attending. Make sure all non-specialized tasks are executed by non-specialized workforce, transitioning these activities is easy and allows brainpower to stay on task.

 

Flow of information shouldn’t be an issue, if your critical group has to wait for information, validation, revisions or approvals then the workflow gets interrupted and downtime happens, make sure that procedures are defined in such a ways that permissions, approvals, licenses and other protocols benefit these critical functions.

 

Look into how many Interactions are happening with other areas and redefine if necessary, it is in here where fractures in the communication flow create the most damage.

 

Finally challenge each activity that demands time from the critical group and simplify, eliminate, redefine or modify as needed.

 

When it comes to equipment, do pay attention to the input and output by understanding what causes variation. However, do look close and ensure that there is consistent information being generated that allows for intervention in short consistent intervals. It is a frequent behavior to allow for “minor” variances in performance to go unattended for long periods of time, either hours, shifts or even days. If executing routine maintenance interrupts the process flow for half a shift or one full shift then there is a possibility that it can be optimized to a more efficient standard. In 24 hour operations shift change is the moment where capacity can be created. The disruption in the way in which the operation is controlled and “fine-tuned” when changes happen are golden opportunities to recover inefficiencies and capacity. Look close at these variations and involve the people that are close into agreeing what is the best way to keep variations under control and the productive flow steady, most of the time you can come up with an improved way to navigate through these changes in an enhanced steady fashion.

 

Identifying the way in which capacity can be created takes observation, analysis of details, involvement of those closer to the execution and a clear understanding of the overall business, believe it or not you can come across areas that do not understand what happens before they start getting involved in the process nor how it is handled once is out of their hands, having this understanding provides light and facilitates the identification of both opportunities and solutions that can be implemented at an accelerated phase, giving the business some of the boost it needs from time to time.

 

Remember that an unbiased perspective is always critical in identifying and capturing opportunities particularly when there is no time to spend on solutions that require additional infrastructure or long periods of training to effectively surpass the learning curve.

 

If you are in this situation seek external help that can provide you with the depth and acceleration you need to create capacity just when you need it.

​

By: Cristopher Del Angel, CEO at To The Top Management Consulting

​

​