The Manufacturer Magazine : Promoting best practice in Manufacturing

Leadership and strategy
From the fundamental requirement of government to provide macroeconomic stability to manufacturing industry's readiness and ability to exploit it, proper strategies are an over-arching requirement without which little can be achieved.

• Building a strategy on a framework of opportunity consisting of investment, science and innovation, best practice, education and infrastructure
• Linking corporate objectives with management decision making
• Making decisions in the context of the business in its entirety
• Operating within the prevailing economic and legislative environment
• Embracing the need for change, and providing leadership

World class manufacturing
'Lean manufacturing' may have become shorthand for all the processes and techniques that transport manufacturing to the very highest levels of efficiency and excellence; but there's more to it than that.

• Lean manufacturing is only part of the story
• Adopting industry best practice through every aspect of manufacturing
• Implementing processes and procedures that embrace the factory floor, the supply chain and the customer
• Benchmarking everything from lead times to customer returns
• Concepts like just-in-time, kaizen, 5S, total quality management, and total productive maintenance
• The imperative is to compete effectively within the given sector

HR & skills
Recruitment, and the retention and training of the best of the four million people directly employed in manufacturing are central to its survival.

• Achieving the culture change necessary for operational transformation
• Adopting new working practices that arise from change
• Joining with government and educationalists to teach and recruit people of the right calibre
• Changing the way manufacturing and factories are perceived
• The payroll and personnel management systems required

Logistics & supply chain
If the key to lean manufacturing is inventory reduction, then the key to inventory reduction is logistics and supply chain management.

• Achieving communication and co-operation between all the internal and external links from all levels of supplier to the customer
• Weighing the pros and cons of sourcing from low cost overseas suppliers, from favoured suppliers or using through the wall component supply
• Harnessing information technology that will make the vision of a fully integrated network of partners work

Design and innovation
In the past and for the future, research & development, design and innovation - the 'front end' of the process of making things - are the activities that best mark out the developed industrial world's place in global manufacturing.

• Meeting the challenge of turning a good idea into a best-selling product
• Technology and skills required for research and development
• Achieving collaboration in design and development, and avoiding conflict between teams
• Anticipating obsolescence and increasing the rate of innovation

IT in manufacturing
Over the past decade or so, the traditional industrial infrastructure comprising services like power, water, telephone communications and drainage to factories and the provision of roads to get to and from them have been all but overwhelmed by the clamour for another enterprise-wide requirement - information technology.

• The integration of all the key elements of business and manufacturing management systems from financials to the factory floor
• Establishing standards and architecture for overall control
• Providing ways and means of monitoring and provoking specific responses to production events
• Moving towards 'plug-in-and-play' connectivity and compatibility

Manufacturing operations
Manufacturing operations - what happens on the shop floor and the machines that make it happen - are, quite literally, the engine room of every industrial enterprise.

• Making the manufacturing process flow through good operations and maintenance procedures
• Utilising data such as machine availability, process cycle times and reliability to increase efficiency and performance
• Managing the relationships between machines, processing steps and the task in hand
• Developing methodologies that cater for the adjustments to manufacturing that are necessary to meet shifts in customer demand