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The Resilience Index* – research commissioned by RS Components into the state of UK manufacturing’s business resilience – has unearthed the key pointers to building process resilience, offering essential learnings to guide the strategic decision making of senior engineers.
If taken, the following actions will help protect companies, push them to think and act differently, and establish a culture of continuous improvement, which will be the foundation for future process and productivity improvements, stability and transformation.
The four identified actions are:
1 Continue to innovate
Senior engineers should seek to build a network of partners to help understand the opportunities and challenges offered by emerging technologies.
Looking to invest in small-scale, reversible pilots to understand the benefits of emerging technology, without the risk of being at the bleeding edge of innovation, is a practical option to boost process resilience through innovation.
2 Build capacity back-up
Many companies need to improve the reliability and robustness of their processes by building in redundancy support. There must be prioritisation of the duplication of critical components or functions of a system to increase reliability.
Redundancy planning must be risk based. Analyse processes and risk assess what could cause issues and the financial impact of them occurring. Then insure against them through building process redundancy, investing, improving asset reliability, contingency planning, and building partnerships.
3 Think differently about outsourcing
Outsourcing strategies need to focus on the benefits that can be gained alongside potential cost savings.
Strategies should carefully consider if outsourcing decisions free up enough internal capacity to help the organisation concentrate on core competencies or allow for quicker adaptations or transformations. The default position of taking processes in-house to drive cost efficiencies needs to be continually challenged, and the holistic benefits of a strategic outsourcing approach closely scrutinised.
4 Continuously improve
Invest in a commitment to build and embed a continuous improvement culture, and the relentless identification and eradication of losses or inefficiencies. Crucially, acknowledge that small, iterative changes over the long term will have a compound effect on processes.
Examine basic processes and aim to incrementally enhance efficiencies and effectiveness. This can be applied to single or multiple processes within the organisation, including procurement strategies; stock holding; energy conversion and consumption; proactive maintenance regimes across the plant, or even workforce patterns.
Taking small improvement steps can make a big difference over the long term – but it requires a proactive, can-do attitude with total company buy-in.
For a copy of The Resilience Index: Process report, visit: https://www.rs-connectedthinking.com/en/operational-efficiency/insight/the-resilience-index-process
* The Resilience Index is a comprehensive and unique investigation of six datasets from the past 20 years covering manufacturing investment, productivity and employment to track resilience across some of the UK’s most prominent industries.
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