Do you feel drained from constant fighting in your business?
Are small inefficiencies in production taking away your profits every single day?
Are you struggling to manage the day-to-day chaos of production tasks?
If you own an MSME in manufacturing, you know that efficiency plays an important part in helping your business grow. But keeping it smooth can seem like a tough and costly challenge.
There’s a smarter approach to improve. It focuses on implementing a strong idea: Manufacturing Operations Management, or MOM. So, what is mom?
This blog explains the manufacturing operations management concept and offers clear steps to follow for creating a manufacturing business that succeeds, stands out, and handles challenges more effectively.
Let’s start with a clear production and operations management definition.
Manufacturing Operations Management (MOM) is about managing your end-to-end manufacturing processes. It acts like a master blueprint for your factory, designed to improve efficiency, maintain quality, and make operations more adaptable.
MOM ensures every task on the factory floor connects to your main business objectives, whether it’s production tasks, planning, scheduling, shop-floor activities, or delivery, streamlining to work together.
It all starts with applying the principles of MOM, like making communication better, creating clear steps for tasks, and keeping track of important numbers.
While MRP tools handle your day-to-day operations, a Manufacturing Strategy answers a bigger question:
Manufacturing Strategy connects the bridge between where your business wants to go and what’s happening on the manufacturing floor. Essentially, a clear strategy aligns technology, processes, and team efforts toward a common goal and is mainly used to reduce production costs and offer high-quality products.
Are you wondering whether prioritising operations is worth it?
Let me tell you…In 2020, Forbes shared a statistic indicating that 10% of global GDP is wasted in Manufacturing. The numbers are in trillion…
To build a strong manufacturing business as an MSME, understanding every rupee and second matters is important. Using a manufacturing operations management framework sets off a cycle of constant improvement that boosts your bottom line.
Here’s how MOM will help you in your business.
When your manufacturing operations are aligned, you stop firefighting to fix problems. This gives you space to focus on growth ideas like new product launches and sales boosts.
Efficient operations set you apart in a crowded market. Manufacturing operations management provides flexibility and adaptability to address supply chain challenges and changing customer needs.
MOM relentlessly focuses on minimising waste, such as excess stock and production errors. It lowers your material and energy costs and eliminates unnecessary expensive storage space.
Managing every part of manufacturing leads to fewer product defects, which means consistently high-quality items that also build the foundation of a trusted brand.
MOM prioritises customer satisfaction through improved quality and timely delivery, which builds loyalty and turns occasional shoppers into regular customers.
For businesses in regulated industries like food or pharmaceuticals, MOM helps ensure compliance with standards, safeguarding against penalties and avoiding harm to their reputation.
MOM removes barriers between departments like production, quality, maintenance, and inventory, enhancing teamwork and the team’s efficiency and workplace morale.
Want to implement a manufacturing operations management system in your manufacturing business?
By learning this, you can evaluate your operations and identify where to start making changes.
To apply this concept, you can use it as four interconnected pillars.
This is the heart of any factory’s operations. It involves planning, scheduling, and real-time tracking. The aim is to optimise the use of materials, labour, and machines to efficiently convert orders into finished goods.
This pillar is focused on making sure all products meet high standards. It utilises real-time monitoring and process checks to prevent any small issues, saving time and reducing costs through proactive quality measures.
This pillar forms the core of your production system in operations management.
This pillar focuses on material and production management, managing the production flow of goods from raw materials to delivering finished products. Effective inventory management aims to prevent delays by ensuring necessary inventory levels. At the same time, it helps minimise excess inventory to free up capital.
This pillar helps to monitor the reliability of all machinery and make sure they are operational. This helps to shift focus from reactive to preventive and predictive maintenance. It also aims to identify and resolve issues before they lead to sudden, expensive breakdowns.
While these components provide a roadmap, turning theory into a system that frees you from the daily grind and builds the systems that will transform your Manufacturing Operations.
Lean Production in Operations Management is a smart and practical approach in a MOM strategy. It focuses on eliminating waste to maximise the value delivered to customers.
This approach provides a clear structure to find and remove eight types of waste in processes, thereby enhancing efficiency and profitability.
To fight these wastes, MSMEs can adopt these Lean Methods –
A system where materials are purchased and products are made only when they are needed and in the exact amount required.
This is about building a culture where all employees are encouraged to make minor, incremental enhancements to their work processes.
A pull system means that production is based on actual customer demand using a common system like Kanban.
The term “5S in Operations Management” stands for Sort, Set in Order, Shine, Standardise and Sustain
If you’re overwhelmed by all the information I shared before and are not sure where to start improving things? The easiest answer is 5S. It provides a systematic way to organise the operations and acts as an affordable way to step into Lean practices and operational success.
Now, let’s understand these 5S –
Go through a work area to separate what’s useful from what’s unnecessary. Removing non-contributing items reduces confusion and creates more room to work.
Arrange necessary items logically and assign a specific place for each. This organisation saves time when looking for tools or parts.
Maintain cleanliness in the workplace. Cleaning also works like an inspection to identify potential issues like loose bolts or worn wires.
Set up rules and checklists to ensure that organising, cleaning, and shining become habitual practices.
Build the habit of maintaining standards over time to make 5S part of your company’s everyday culture. This step is often the most challenging, yet also the most important, for long-term success.
Manufacturing Resource Planning (MRP) in operations management means a system that answers three critical questions:
What is needed? How much is required? And when is it required?
As your business grows, so does complexity. This MRP system gives you planning for materials, machines, and labour, giving a more holistic view of your production capacity. Nowadays, this feature is built into larger Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems. These ERP systems integrate various aspects of your business, including sales and finance.
As an MSME, you don’t need to purchase a high-profile ERP system. At the start, just focus on integrating MRP to bring together the three main inputs to form one central source:
This is your strategic plan of what to make and when to make it, influenced by actual customer orders and sales forecasts.
A comprehensive list of every single part or item needed for production to maintain accuracy.
A real-time overview of stock levels, including raw materials, items in production, and finished goods.
By linking these three pieces of information, you create a foundation to run a more efficient operation.
MRP converts your production plan into precise, actionable instructions, producing transformative improvements in three main areas.
MRP systems help you handle and optimise inventory by calculating material needs. This approach enables you to shift to a Just-in-Time ordering system, reducing over-ordering costs and ensuring timely material availability.
MRP removes the guesswork in scheduling by creating a data-driven timeline that starts at the product’s delivery deadline, allowing teams to plan backwards. This timeline shows each purchase order and work order required to meet that date, aligned with real customer demand.
MRP maximises the utilisation of resources, such as your workers, machines, and materials. It keeps labour and supplies synchronised with schedules and ensures that workers have the necessary materials and machine time, preventing delays and inefficiencies.
The process of shifting a disorganised operation to a clear strategic manufacturing operations management setup might feel overwhelming at first. However, it’s about making gradual progress and making steady improvements step by step.
Start today and choose one part of your manufacturing operations to focus on. This will reduce waste, boost efficiency, and allow you to focus on what’s important: growing your business.
Liked these strategies? Explore more articles on inventory control to team management, and find your next winning strategy for manufacturers.
None can destroy iron, but its own rust can! Likewise, none can destroy a person, but their own mindset can.
Former chairperson of the Tata Group
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