The iron and steel industry is a vital sector for the entire economy. Raw material processing and part manufacturing are the steps that provide the necessary materials for various sectors, particularly the construction industry. To maintain productivity and increase profitability, it's essential to understand the key industrial production indicators to apply in your factory.
Production indicators are statistics that indicate your factory's performance, both quantitatively and qualitatively. This allows you to verify whether your production meets demand and meets market requirements.
With the right metrics, you can track not only your current performance but also evaluate your long-term progress, which is crucial for fostering continuous growth and improvement.
To help you gain more control over your factory, in this article we've detailed the 7 industrial production indicators you can't afford to miss in the iron and steel industry!
Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) is one of the quality indicators most important production processes. It evaluates the overall performance of your equipment, measuring the productivity extracted from your machinery.
This indicator is based on 3 factors:
When equipment is operating at high capacity, stably, and with few or no product defects, Overall Equipment Efficiency is high.
In addition to considering the productivity of your machinery, it's essential to evaluate your team's performance within the factory. After all, it's their performance that has the greatest impact on the quality of the final product and the efficiency of the entire process. The Man-Hour Productivity indicator takes into account the total production per hour of work for each employee.
The main function of this metric is to understand workforce efficiency—that is, how much a single individual can produce in an hour, regardless of other circumstances. This number also helps estimate the impact of hiring new employees on factory productivity.
Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) is the average time it takes your team to repair any faulty equipment and return it to a functional state so production can resume.
The metric provides the team with factory management visibility to improve machine repair planning. When combined with Man-Hour Productivity, the indicator also allows you to calculate the impact of this repair time on productivity.
Similar to the previous metric, Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) indicates the average interval between defects occurring in your factory's machinery. Using this information, you can establish a more efficient maintenance policy. The longer this interval, the more optimized the equipment's use.
Problems with any equipment can have a considerable impact on the entire logistics of the factory, even when there is good predictability about these failures. Therefore, implementing actions to increase the Mean Time Between Failures is a way to reduce maintenance costs and improve productivity overall.
Translated as “on time and complete”, On Time In Full (OTIF) is an indicator that represents how well your company is able to meet public demands, not only in terms of quality and quantity, but also in relation to the deadline desired by the customer.
This is an indicator that reflects the alignment between production efficiency and sales, as these two areas need to work together to ensure delivery times meet customer expectations.
Furthermore, the larger the number of customers your factory serves, the more important it is to maintain a high production rate. In this context, if sales exceed production capacity, delays begin to occur.
Conversely, when production exceeds sales, your merchandise sits idle for longer. Therefore, to maintain an ideal OTIF, you need to achieve a balance between production and sales.
Another industrial production indicator that cannot be overlooked is your Rework Rate. This metric represents the proportion of units that leave your production line but need to be reworked or discarded due to an initial defect.
As you can imagine, the Rework Fee applies to products that leave your factory directly, that is, it does not consider any damage during the process. cargo transportation.
A very high rework rate indicates the presence of problems in your production line, which may be related to a specific part of the process or a misalignment at the team level. In either case, an internal assessment is necessary to accurately identify the failure and correct it.
Finally, you need to track your factory's Production Cycle Time. This is the average time it takes to complete each unit on your production line, from start to finish.
Production Cycle Time should be considered at all stages of your planning. For example, if a product has a lot of seasonality, it is interesting to analyze how this production cycle can be accelerated or reduced, according to the demand of each period.
Closely monitoring your industrial production indicators is essential to promoting growth and efficiency in your factory. To monitor this with maximum accuracy, develop realistic projections, and build robust strategies, it's worth investing in systems that enable efficient data collection.
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