I often hear from operations managers, ‘We get our work done but I’m not sure how much time is spent on the job’. That is a utilization issue. Utilization is the percentage of time a resource is adding value. This could be a person or a machine. In a well-run operation, utilization can go as high as 90 percent. Depending on management disciplines and constraints it can easily dip to below fifty percent. That’s a lot of lost resources and a lot of wasted time. Two tools that we implement to optimize utilization are Thrive’s Downtime Technology and our Skills Flex Matrix.
Thrives Downtime Technology allows us to more accurately pinpoint the waste associated with downtime on machine runtimes. Our Skills Flex Matrix allows us to train personnel across the board and job vector into jobs to drive utilization higher. Combining both of those tools results in higher utilization numbers, higher profit numbers and higher productivity numbers. Everybody wins in that situation.