Every organization has a production function, whether it is products and / or services, so it is of utmost importance that this function is managed in the best way in order to achieve competitive advantage
Although production is generally associated with the fact of producing material goods such as food, clothing or automobiles, the production function is present in any socio-economic entity, whether it offers intangible material goods or services.
The production or operational function has as its objective the physical operations that must be carried out to transform raw materials into products or to carry out a service, therefore the administration of production tends to the most economical use of means (locations, machinery or resources of any kind) by people (operators, employees) in order to transform materials into products or perform services.
Production. Production is the study of management techniques used to achieve the greatest difference between added value and incorporated cost as a result of transforming resources into final products.
To familiarize ourselves with production, what better than to know some of its basic terms:
- Service: intangible good that has two basic characteristics, individualization and being highly perishable. Product: tangible good that results from a manufacturing process. 1 Capacity: theoretical value that we refer to as the quantity per unit of time that would be obtained when using to the maximum all available resources (Example: 10 watches / hour). Demonstrated capacity: average value of the capacities developed by the production process during a certain period of time, it is used as a more practical and less theoretical term than is the capacity. For example, if a process has returned the following productions in one week: 10 watches / day, 8 watches / day, 7 watches / day, 12 watches / day, 11 watches / day, 14 watches / day, and 9 watches / day; then the demonstrated ability is:
Demonstrated capacity = 10 + 8 + 7 + 12 + 11+ 14 +9 / 7 days = 10.14 watches / day
- Load: quantity of product per unit of time required of a process at a given moment. Overload: when the load is greater than capacity and the process cannot operate as desired and inventories of products appear. Bottleneck: resources that limit capacity and cause overload. Production time: time required to perform one or more operations. It is broken down into waiting, preparation, operation and transfer time.
- Waiting time: time that the product is until the operation begins Preparation time: time that is needed to properly dispose the resources that are going to carry out the operation Operation time: time consumed by the resources to carry out the operation Transfer time: time necessary to transporting a quantity of product that has already undergone one operation to a new one
The only one of these times that adds value is the operating time, the administration must find a way to make the others minimal.
- * Productive capacity: is the amount of resources, mainly labor force and machinery, that are available in the production process. * Continuous flow process: process where the product flow always follows a sequence of operations that is established by the characteristics of the product.. Within them are:
- Continuous processes: those that produce without any pause and without transition between operation and operation, are generally used in fully standardized products. Serial processes: processes in which there is a transition between operations and are differentiated by requiring the application of machinery or hand different work in each operation.
- Batch flow processes: in these processes, any change between products of the same family requires prior preparation of the machinery. Preparation involves a time when the production line will be stopped, which in turn implies a valuable cost in terms of production not done that must be recovered with the production of lots of many units and thus distribute that cost among more units. Alternating flow processes: they produce in batches but in minimal quantities, even units. Preparation times are required to be minimized to be cost-effective. Intermittent flow processes: production processes that do not have a fixed sequence of operations,the flow of operations is determined by the processed product and for this there is not a specific machine but different machines capable of doing different tasks. Non-flow processes: processes where the operations are arranged around the product. There is no a priori designed flow, so they are especially useful for products by design.
