Production profitability in the molding or extrusion businesses is multifaceted and typically spans multiple data management systems. It often requires the use of data contained in standalone spread sheets, and depends on an employee manual inputting and compiling the information.

This presents several problems that many plastic processing business owners struggle to circumvent the invisibility factor. The various facets of profitability are like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, where each piece has a place and a key role to play. Only this puzzle is also time sensitive. If we only figure out our margins weeks after the months’ close, we are already sunk.

Most business owners agree that knowledge is power, but many would do well to take that notion a step further. You cannot fight what you cannot see, rendering invisibility one of the leading contributors to loss in modern business.

Let’s have a look at the some of the problems that may arise from invisibility in the production process:

1- Communication

Each link in your manufacturing chain must be afforded the information they need to facilitate the tasks assigned to the next link. Failure to communicate the appropriate information to each link often results in miscommunication on site, inadequate manpower, and other problems. These problems compromise the integrity of not only the link in question, but also the entire process, and thus, invites loss.

2- Benchmarking

Business owners use various tools to examine the efficacy of their operations over extended periods of time. This is called benchmarking. It is a process from which no facet of your business should be excluded, especially added value multi-level plastics manufacturing. Invisibility in your process chain renders accurate benchmarking impossible.

Not only should each link be scrutinized for its own efficacy, but for its place in the entire process. Unless individuals working each link are keenly aware of how their efforts will impact the operations involved in the next link, such scrutiny can’t be imposed upon the procedures.

3- Data Management

Many manufacturers overstock raw material to ensure shortages don’t impact production and delivery schedules. Often this requirement to stock high volumes stems from production and efficiency reports that are not updating inventory qualities in real time. This causes a gap that drastically impact the customers’ real time requirements and company reputation. The higher the frequency with which manufacturing is tracked and reported, the more valuable the information is to those who need them the most such as planning, order entry, and purchasing.

Real time inventory reporting occupies but a fraction of the data that your plastics molding or extrusion operation requires to function properly. The integrity of your entire operation depends upon departmental integration in order to properly manage. Each link affects the efficacy of the entire structure, and the appropriate parties in each link must have transparency to communicate with those in other links about the information they need in order to have on hand information available when it’s still actionable. That’s the true realization, that not only do such needs exist for accurate data but that a simple delivery method via real time dashboard or via mobile device is the only way to ensure that measures and then corrective actions regularly take place as problems arise, and not via post mortem at the end of the week or month.