BEST PRACTICES BUSINESS GUIDES

Machines Italia, a joint initiative between the Italian Trade Commission and 14 leading Italian machinery manufacturers' associations, is proud to offer you its complimentary series of best-practices business guides.

The guides written by industry experts John R. Brandt and George Taninecz, both of the Manufacturing Performance Institute as well as former editors of IndustryWeek, outline the step-by-step actions and policies that plant managers, purchasing executives, and senior management must implement to avoid the common pitfalls which can impede your company's growth and success in today's dynamic marketplace.

We hope that you find these guides beneficial for your needs and that when making future purchasing decisions, you will consider at least a few of the tens of thousands Italian manufacturers who look forward to turning their innovation into your productivity.

Strategic Asset Management: Getting More Out of Less (we kindly ask you to perform a required one-time registration)

Regardless of where a manufacturer competes in today's global economy, two factors underlie its strategy: A relentless push to reduce costs and an equally relentless focus on customers' current and future needs. Savvy manufacturing leaders are increasingly turning to optimized machine performance to manage both pressures — and to boost profits. The bottom line? Strategic management of machinery assets is now a must for manufacturers in a highly competitive, often-unpredictable global economy. Leading manufacturers have always focused on optimizing machine performance. For example, U.S. and Canadian manufacturers closest to world-class manufacturing status generally exhibit better equipment performance, as well as greater equipment performance improvement over the past three years. Read on to see how this guide can help you to lower risk, reduce costs, improve performance and gain agility!

Customer Line Integration: New Opportunities for Experienced Manufacturers (we kindly ask you to perform a required one-time registration)

After repeatedly asking themselves a difficult question —"What value does the production of a product bring to the business of manufacturing?" — many had to face the stark reality: Production represents an ever diminishing share. Controlling production and making products are no longer the heart of manufacturing — and haven't been for some time. Instead, leading organizations now work with a team of partner companies, each of which brings its own expertise to meet the needs of a particular customer group. As manufacturers adapt to this new reality, they optimize their business strategies and processes to create greater value for their customer — who promptly ask for more! This new paradigm extends to the shopfloors of manufacturers themselves, as savvy executives realize that their own suppliers — manufacturers of high-tech production equipment and third-party line integrators — are often better at planning, designing and installing new production lines and upgrades than they are. How did this come to pass?

"Capacity Optimization: A manufacturer's guide for getting the most out of equipment, people, and processes" (we kindly ask you to perform a required one-time registration)

The ability to squeeze every ounce of productivity from existing operations can mean thousands of dollars in savings. Yet many companies still confuse productivity with increased output - forgetting than profitable productivity not only increases margins but prevents costly overproduction. Savvy manufacturers focus instead on capacity optimization - the ability to efficiently produce exactly what's needed, when it's needed, without costly buildups of unwanted inventories.

"Powerful Performance Measures: An executive primer to performance measures that drive improvement" (we kindly ask you to perform a required one-time registration)

Every organization has its favorite metrics measurements that gauge control, progress, and success. At a world-class organization, these measures serve as a common "performance language" that links corporate strategy, divisional goals, plant targets, departmental budgets, and individual incentives into a unified, results-oriented system. But at a mediocre or failing organization, these measures usually turn into management babble and confusion reams of records and disjointed findings tracked simply because "that's what we've always done." Metrics at these organizations become straitjackets restraints that actually waste resources, aggravate employees, and block improvement.

How can companies break out of the metrics maze and develop a more successful performance-management process? By focusing executive effort on what makes performance measures powerful and useful and by implementing a seven-step review that continuously analyzes, updates, and transitions new and better metrics into the organization.

"Benchmarking: An executive primer to locating and leveraging manufacturing best practices" (we kindly ask you to perform a required one-time registration)

Envy may be one of the seven deadly sins, but its presence is vital when it comes to operations performance. Every executive wants his or her company or plant to be at least as good as those of his or her peers; most, in fact, want them to be better-or even the best.

Unfortunately, it takes more than simple desire to be the best. Outperforming competitors requires an intense study of those competitors-of their financial results, of their operating metrics, of their management strategies and practices-as well as a willingness to invest time, energy, and resources into adapting the results of that study to a new operations environment.

In short, every great performance, every continuous-improvement project, begins with a benchmark. Leading manufacturing facilities annually save on average more than $8,000 per employee through continuous-improvement projects and programs, and benchmarking is a core component of that success. And while no two organizations benchmark in the same fashion, there are four fundamental phases that manufacturing organizations must address in order to get the most out of a benchmarking effort.

"Smart Capital: The sharp manufacturer's guide to equipment purchases" (we kindly ask you to perform a required one-time registration)

More than $143 billion was spent on capital expenditures by U.S. manufacturers in 2001, representing about $400,000 per manufacturing facility or $2.8 million per purchasing executive (purchasing agents and purchasing managers). Yet many of those investment decisions were made by purchasing departments with little or no input from operations executives. Equally disturbing is that a significant number of these purchases came directly from the plant floor, without any real involvement of either local or corporate purchasing departments.

Purchasing capital equipment without the active participation of operations personnel inevitably leads to decisions based only on price - often with disastrous consequences. On the other hand, investing in capital equipment without the expertise of a corporate purchasing department often results in organization-wide inefficiencies including overpayment, missed economies of scale, and lack of integration between facilities and business units.

Smart manufacturers avoid such pitfalls by assembling a capital-purchase team that combines the broad skills of purchasing and manufacturing, as well as the strategic input of senior executives.

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