The Best Way to Manage Multiple Manufacturing Facilities

The location provides you an edge in manufacturing. Many manufacturers are therefore operating in various hub facilities. The management of many worksites nevertheless has its own range of challenges. You face the risk of incoherence and miscommunication. The mismanagement of several facilities might destroy connections with your clients and eliminate all advantages that you could have gained.

Below are seven ways you can effectively manage operations across multiple manufacturing facilities.

1. Keep Lines of Communication Open

In every work setting, good communication is essential, but especially when manufacturing is distributed across different locations. What can you do to ensure that communication links remain open?

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• To inspect every facility as often as possible, use cloud-based facility management software. Use it to share updates and receive feedback from employees.
• Perform one-on-one regular conference calls for each facility. Host a global conference call every month, if you run more than two.
• Call for comments from employees by email. You want them to know that you’re listening, even if you can’t be there in person.

2. Take Advantage of Technology

As we now have the technology to accomplish that efficiently, we make it increasingly simpler to operate several facilities.

• The feedback that you submit to a manager with a facility management mobile app is the same punch that you send as one to two states. If you are tiresome in picking up your phone (and many bosses argue it is), you can use the web app.
• Remote communications must not be impersonal. You have several options for a video conference that holds personal information, such as FaceTime, Skype, or Google Hangouts.
• The facility management software allows you to monitor progress anywhere. And it enables you to maintain uniform operations across several sites. Have your workforce monitor tasks and time online to maintain better tabs.
• The procedures connected to maintenance can now be efficiently handled using numerous CMMS software solutions that are widely readily available. These programs can help manage continuous on-site improvement to further increase Lean and other performance improvement initiatives

3. Keep Decision-Making Inclusive

Giving orders from afar is one thing; seeking advice on critical company choices is quite another. It encourages cohesiveness over distance and good for morale

• Give each facility’s management a say in company-wide decisions like policy changes, production modifications, and other major issues.
• Allow employees to voice their opinions on a regular basis. At the absolute least, establish a company-wide “suggestion box” and respond to each suggestion via conference calls or via email so that employees feel they are being heard, even if they aren’t in the office.

4. Assign On-Site Leadership Roles

You must have confidence in your managers, particularly if you can’t see them.

• Have managers report to you more frequently on-site than if they had been in the same building via email or daily telephone calls.
• Empower managers to be local decision-makers. But be aware of where their authority ends and when they have to reply to you.

5. Establish Company Best Practices

Set up clear, coherent best practices and share them through your manufacturing facility management platform. Train them on best practices, and make sure staff understand them from any office. if they don’t to a universal company policy to which they may refer, it is not enough to have strong local management.

6. Do Inter-Facility Team Building

Workers at every manufacturing facility have the same objectives that are productive and that the company as a whole can achieve success. These goals can best be achieved as a team.

• Many facilities find it advantageous to do team-building exercises annually at each facility, where employees get to know each other better and can grasp the different duties of each facility and plant. You can do so throughout the whole company, either at an annual meeting or in a private company social media platform with employees.
• In the same way, team building in a conference call-style at least can enable employees to make their names with a face so they can be more comfortable when they have to engage remotely.

7. Recognize that Each Facility is Different

While emphasizing a uniform policy and management style, remember that each manufacturing has particular local demands.

• Internationally and nationally, cultures vary. Be alert to varying customs or holidays that may impact routines.
• Similarly, rules differ across borders. Perhaps in the United States, what works in Asia or Mexico may not work.