By Home Tendance 
Industrial processing is at the heart of manufacturing, turning raw materials into finished products across industries such as food production, chemical processing, and heavy machinery. To ensure efficiency, safety, and high product quality, businesses must follow best practices that keep operations running smoothly.
It’s certainly a fascinating journey for a product, starting from the factory floor to the end consumer. Whether you’re new to this sector or a seasoned industrialist, it’s important to get accustomed to the best practices in industrial manufacturing and processing.
Understanding and correctly implementing these practices is what can distinguish you from a rookie player or a market leader. Companies that adopt smart strategies can cut waste, boost productivity, and maintain consistent product standards, giving them a competitive advantage in the market.
This article takes you through the key best practices followed by leading industrial manufacturing and processing units.
Contents
1. Meeting Quality Assurance and Compliance Standards
Every industry has a set of regulations that manufacturing facilities must follow. For instance, the pharmaceutical sector follows GMP regulations for manufacturing medicines, while automotive manufacturers need to ensure they build automobiles according to the government’s safety and emission standards. These regulations create a foundation of quality assurance (QA) in manufacturing.
These regulatory compliances also extend to the type of equipment used in manufacturing. This is why biotechnology, food processing, and pharmaceutical facilities have fully validated and automated CIP machines to maintain the highest hygiene and sanitary standards.
Similarly, automation in manufacturing can be a game changer in ensuring the processes are repeated exactly with negligible scope of errors to avoid flouting compliance norms.
Complying with the respective set of regulations ensures the products manufactured are of high quality, safe to use, and meet the desired regulatory and end-consumer outcomes.
2. Lean Manufacturing
As the name suggests, lean manufacturing is an industry-accepted best practice aimed at reducing waste and focusing on adding value. This concept emerged from Toyota, the Japanese automaker and pioneer of the lean manufacturing process, whose efficiency practices have become an industry standard. This best practice emphasises doing more and more with less human effort, equipment, time and space while coming closer to what customers really want.
The 5 governing principles of lean manufacturing are value, the value stream, flow, pull and perfection. The last principle, the pursuit of perfection, is not limited to the shop floor but is applicable across all levels of the organisation, from shop floor workers to project managers to the executive tier. It brings in a culture of continuous improvement and a sense of responsibility for creating value.
While this process is popular in the industrial sector for product manufacturing, it can also be applied to multiple other non-industrial sectors, including business consulting. Consulting firms like McKinsey step in to help growing businesses cut unnecessary processes and streamline their operations.
3. Total Productive Maintenance
If you’ve been in the manufacturing business for long, you’ll know there’s nothing worse than your machines breaking down without warning. It can halt your production processes indefinitely, affecting your manufacturing schedules and supply-chain commitments. This is where Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) comes in, focusing on the importance of maintenance and upkeep of your industrial equipment.
This industrial best practice involves everyone in maintaining the manufacturing equipment, moving away from the traditional approach of limiting the responsibilities to the maintenance team. This holistic approach involves all stakeholders, from operators to management, to proactively maintain manufacturing equipment. TPM is built around 8 core principles, including autonomous maintenance, planned maintenance, quality maintenance, and comprehensive training.
Following this best practice can drastically reduce downtime, boost productivity and extend the lifespan of your equipment. There’s nothing better for a factory or producing unit than having their manufacturing and processing systems looked after well and running smoothly.
4. Just In Time (JIT) Manufacturing
Getting their products to the market faster, while keeping costs low, is the ideal situation that manufacturers desire. This is exactly what Just in Time (JIT) manufacturing practice aims to achieve. JIT helps manufacturers streamline their production plans, lower production costs, and improve lead time.
How does JIT work? JIT allows you to plan your material order with your production schedule in such a way that raw materials arrive only when they’re needed for manufacturing. Because you use only what you need, you have control over the inventory levels and lower its costs, while producing less waste.
Like lean manufacturing, JIT also follows the principle of continuous improvement and generating negligible waste. Just In Time works best for businesses that can accurately estimate and forecast consumer demand. You see JIT in action at Dell, a leading manufacturer of laptops and personal computers, where orders for spare parts are placed only once a customer confirms an order.
Summing Up
The most successful industrial and manufacturing companies follow some or all of these practices. Whether you’re keen to minimize waste through lean manufacturing or maintain quality control and assurance by following regulatory guidelines, these 4 best practices in manufacturing and industrial processing can help you take your business to new heights.
They are more than just an item to tick off your checklist, as they bring top-tier approaches to push a fundamental shift in mindset and the way you run your business.
Which practice are you keen on applying to your business?