How to quickly assess the production capacity of garment factories? The women's wear processing factory tells everyone that if we are a brand business, we should go to the supplier's site to understand its production status, production efficiency, and quality control. As a processing factory, you should also go to the customer's demonstration factories to understand the standardized production processing and better serve customers.

 

1. The importance of on-site observation

 

For apparel production enterprises, any details can be seen through the scene. The root cause of any major problems can be found from the scene. Even if you are in a limited time, you can fully grasp the key information about the operation of the factory as long as you grasp the key points.

 

2. The working atmosphere at the workshop

 

Firstly, you can see the real mental outlook of the employees on the spot. The employees with high morale will be in sharp contrast with the loose and indifferent employees. Talking to the workers, you can also get important first impressions from the workers' facial expressions and body language, because these directly reflect the workers' emotions and satisfaction with the factory. For example, we visited a factory where the workshops played enjoyable music. In this kind of surroundings, you can see the workers’ enthusiasm is very high. Working in such a relaxed and pleasant environment, the efficiency is relatively higher than others and the production qualities will also make clients more confident.

 

When walking in the workshop, please pay attention to observe the phenomenon of uneven busy and stacking. For example, most of the workers in the group are very busy, but some of workers are unoccupied for a long time, or some workers have been waiting for materials for a long time in the station. If this phenomenon existence in the factory, it indicates that the factory lacks experience with management and the utilization rate of personnel is very low. It will result that idle employees affect the working atmosphere of others. The overall work efficiency will become low and the cost will become very high.

 

 Paying attention to whether the workshop has sufficient light, the air circulation is smooth, there is unpleasant odor on the site, the noise is too large, and the workshop is tidy. Because these will also directly affect the mood of the workers, which will affect the production efficiency and product quality. It's hard to imagine a factory with lazy or low atmosphere, employees with resentful or idle that can make good products and create benefits.

 

3. Space utilization and layout

 

Some factory superiors regard as the production workshop is the larger, the better. As a result, the utilization rate is often low, and the equipment and process layout are scattered. This will not only waste space, but also the fabric and trims are also being carried out in the factory. However, In Japan, most factories do not seem so spectacular, even a little cramped, but the space utilization rate is high and the circulation efficiency is also very high.

 

Transportation not only takes up space and has high operating costs, but also results in unnecessary material movement. Once in a client’s factory, we saw a lot of carts operate busily in the workshop, and there was a lot of unnecessary transportation. For example, the same batch of fabrics was moved from Area A to Area B after processing, then moved back to Area A for post-processing, then moved to Area C for processing, and finally moved back to Area B, which wasted too much time to move.

 

In principle, When the production fabric was used, It should be stored along the production line, rather than being separated and stored in several inventory, and the tools should be placed as close as possible to the machine. The factory layout should ensure the smooth flow of products and try to avoid any partitions. If the fabric store distance was too long to the production line, handling routes repeatedly, or handling many times in a factory, it means that the layout is unreasonable and the space utilization is not ideal. It also means that the production line has not been assembled as much as possible.

 

4. On-site standardization

 

The standard is the implementation reference of good state and uniform. Without standards, there is no way to implement them. There are many standards on the production lines, including operation and quality standards, 6S and safety standards, operation and maintenance standards, process and rework standards, safety stock standards and so on.

 

By observing the specific operation process of different employees in the same process, you can find the difference between them. Such as the order of actions, operation intensity, and whether there are omissions. If there is a difference, the lack of standardized operation training for the lathes will greatly increase the possibility of product variation. When we inspected in a supplier factory, we found that the gestures and sequence of different zippers on different lathes are different, and there is no standard action video for reference. It was based on the experience of the lathes. When use such kind of products, users will appear out of chain when using this product.

 

5. Control of production quality

 

On-site observation should focus on the treatment of defective products in the workshop. Good factories will expose the problems and solve them, rather than cover up the defective and waste products. For example, if a process has rework, the good managed factory will use a red label to highlight it, so that you can immediately know whether rework is increasing, or whether a station in the assembly line is producing defective products.

 

6. Visualization of the production site

 

Visible Board management and visual management are the foundations of on-site management. It is also an intuitive communication of the management level of a production enterprise. In well-managed factories, visual tools are everywhere. Including the organization and standardization of the workplace, the visualization of the result index, the visualization of the standard operation, the visualization of the control index, the visualization of automatic error prevention and correction, the alarm mechanism, etc. When visiting, you should pay attention to looking for various visual tools.

 

The visual management Visible Board can be divided into static and dynamic management Visible Board. The static Visible Board is mainly to convey the organization's long-term management philosophy. The dynamic Visible Board is the management information that managers must grasp at any time, and it can better reflect the management level and ability of a factory.

 

7. Tools and equipment status

 

In a good factory, the equipment is neat and well-maintained, and information about the equipment is clear and updated instantly. In addition, the daily checklist should also be recorded completely, and some of the checklist clearly recorded the hidden dangers discovered by the operator, as well as the signature and processing plan of the equipment department. This shows that the equipment management and maintenance have formed a benign system.