Manufacturing Process Efficiency Improves with Wireless Communication

How much would manufacturing process efficiency improve if all the workers on your plant floor could talk to each other? All the time? From anywhere in the plant? What if managers and supervisors—offsite and onsite—could speak to every worker, individually or as a group, as if through an intercom? What would happen if worker safety improved as a result?

It’s not only possible, it’s being done. Integrating hands-free, wireless headset communication systems with 20 dBA noise reduction ratings into your workflow can help you attain at least 6 lean and Six Sigma manufacturing process benchmarks.

Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE)

A low or bad OEE score is 40%. Typical is 60%. World class is 85%. Improving your OEE score by even a fraction of a percentage using wireless team communications to eliminate work interruptions will result in higher profitability. Here’s a GE success story that shows how improving an OEE score by 6% resulted in a $15 million annual savings.

Throughput improvements to manufacturing process

Keep lines working by letting employees ask questions and receive notifications without stepping away from their station. If a machine or unit goes down, then accelerate repair time by enabling workers to immediately notify the right people about a problem. Better yet, workers on the front line are better positioned to recognize a potential problem before it happens, allowing you to implement a fix before downtime becomes an issue.

Capacity utilization

With uptime increased by plant-wide, real-time communication, total manufacturing output capacity will begin to rise.

Schedule or production attainment

You know those start-of-shift meetings that tend to take longer than you want? Shorten or eliminate them and communicate production goals while workers are producing.

Productivity in Revenue per Employee

Eventually, as workers get used to being wirelessly connected, your profitability will increase. You’ll know when this happens when your profit margin increases but you haven’t had to hire additional workers or add overtime.

Improve safety

The hearing protection provided by wireless headsets will help deter occupational noise-induced hearing loss (NIHL). Innovations such as listen-through technology and the ability to speak, hear and interrupt when needed will sharpen situational awareness.

Kaizen, Agile Manufacturing and Theory of Constraints are all documented strategies that help improve manufacturing process efficiency. But why not start with simply improving communication? By preserving time for productive work with a wireless headset team communications solution, you can improve manufacturing process efficiency and quality.