Production engineers have two competing priorities throughout the year. One is to support the maintenance engineering department, and the other is to integrate new products into the plant and packaging line. This kind of segmented planning can be very confusing and often puts production engineers in a bind. How can they organize these competing tasks to achieve a more effective workflow?
In my experience as director of product planning at Videojet, I have found that data drives sound decision-making and helps prioritize problems and daily workload. The data found in the plant and on the packaging line provides a bigger picture as to what is going on, allowing the production engineer to easily identify what needs to be done to support maintenance. There are three main ways production engineers can prioritize problems: Sorting measurements, considering safety planning and quantifying soft costs.