How to Improve Factory Project Management Systems in China

We wrote before about the advantages of having a production planning system. However, if you manufacture highly-engineered, custom-build products, you probably adopted a project management approach.

This type of work is common for industrial products, in oil & gas, in commercial construction, and so on. Not every factory makes batches of 20,000 identical widgets.

So, in such cases, how to improve factory project management systems like these? 

How To Improve Factory Project Management Systems In China?

A typical factory project management system from MTG would look like this:

Let’s look at the way we typically approach such a project to improve systems and get to a more organised and productive level.

1. Get the different services to discuss and agree

Do sales, design, engineering, manufacturing, and after-sale (commissioning) talk together? Different services are involved – do they even know what the others are doing?

We generally start by a collaborative planning session. For example, designers and engineers want to keep the ‘design intent’, while production people want ease of manufacturing. These objectives can be compatible if the two groups work together.

At the start of the project, it is also important to collect some important information (current BOM, tooling...) and analyze it. It can greatly impact the amount of work.

Typical deliverables are an action plan coupled with a Gantt chart, and the acceptance of the different department heads.

In simple terms, the goal is to ensure all the information and materials are ready on time, and to ensure both designers and manufacturers reach their objectives.

2. Implementation of changes

Once all have agreed to go ahead, the hard work of implementation starts.

Typical action items include:

• Finding ways to improve communication between department – that usually involves gaining a better understanding of what other departments do, but also setting up formal communication channels.
• Improving the BOM (Bill of Materials) to make the job of purchasing and planning easier. (One big downside of a project management system is the inability to optimize the load of resources across projects; however, a planning function can be set up within the project management structure.)
• Having design, engineering, and manufacturing work together to improve tooling and take other measures to make manufacturing easier – the result is always better quality and lower cost.
• Improving the lines and materials set up, in order to increase efficiencies in production.
• Getting to the point where step 1 of the production of a product starts with all needed parts and tools in place.
• Improve material display and internal logistics so as to reduce walk time for operators.
• Ensure KPIs make sense, from the managers down to the operators.

3. Fine-tuning and maintenance

A project is never fully completed. Once we have reached the promised deliverables, there is always a need for help. But not as intense as during the heat of implementation.

Furthermore, any organization that doesn’t actively work on ‘holding the gains’ will get back to its initial state. That’s what physicists call entropy – one of the most powerful laws of the universe. And we see this very often in China.

For these two reasons, consultants often keep coming to the factory 1-4 days a month for a period of 12-24 months – the time for the changes to become fully part of the way they do business and part of their management system.

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Is your production organized according to a project management approach?  What are its advantages and downsides? Have you taken steps to make changes and get better results? How did it work out?

Please share you questions, thoughts, or comments on how to improve factory project management below or anything else below, and we'll be happy to reply!