Small manufacturing: throughput, rework, and the KPI wall
- Before ERP theater, you need honest flow: where work waits, where it breaks, where it returns.
- Rework has root causes that are boring to fix and expensive to ignore.
- This week: three metrics on a whiteboard—nothing else until those stabilize.
Throughput is a story about queues
In a 15-person shop, the constraint moves daily: a late raw receipt, a single skilled setup, a QC hold, a customer change. Big plants hide slack; small plants feel every hour. The winning habit is visibility—what job is here, why, since when—without turning the floor into paperwork theater.
Rework without blame games
Most rework clusters around a few defect types. Name them, count them, fix the top one with a mistake-proof or checklist at the source—not a lecture. People don’t enjoy doing jobs twice; systems make double work inevitable when specs travel by word of mouth.
The KPI wall that fits on one sheet
You can drown in metrics. For many SMB plants, on-time ship, first-pass yield (or simple scrap/rework rate), and order-to-cash cycle tell 80% of the story. Everything else is a drill-down.
This week: plant reality check
- Walk the floor with a stopwatch mindset—where is static inventory (WIP piles)?
- List last month’s top five rework reasons in plain English; pick one for a 30-day experiment.
- Traveler audit: three random jobs—did the floor packet match what sales promised?
- Daily 10-minute stand-up: stuck jobs only— who unsticks, by when.
- Supplier subplot: late materials as percent of delayed ships—name names.
Where lean meets practical automation
Automation helps when it removes re-keying: quotes to work orders, BOM sync, simple alerts when a gate slips. It hurts when it adds fields nobody reads. Fit the tool to the standard work, not the other way around.
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