Preparing for the Busy Season: Set Yourself Up for Success by Taking a Few Proactive Steps
By Eric Thompson and Joe Erb
With the promise of warmer and sunnier weather comes busier shop floors, as door and window manufacturers prepare themselves for an influx of orders and a hotter pace of production.
Being prepared is important. When orders are coming in hot, shipping times are paramount yet some of your staff members will use their vacation days. Under the circumstances, even small challenges can cost you.
Luckily, there are some concrete steps you can take now to minimize those challenges ahead.
The slower months before busy season offer a great opportunity to perform some critical preventative maintenance tasks.
For example, if you fabricate your own insulating glass units (IGUs), take some downtime to fully break down, inspect and clean your glass washing station. This involves more than the standard quality checks you probably perform throughout the year. Replace your rollers and brushes—even if they may not be fully at the end of their useful life. You’ll regret not doing so if your brushes stop getting your glass clean once August rolls around.
The same is true at your framing and welding station. Inspect your tooling and dies. Look for signs of wear that might get worse over the next few months and make replacements as necessary. Elsewhere, certain suppliers offer quality and maintenance audits; if you’ve got a report sitting around with fixes that haven’t been made yet, now’s a good time to check those off the list.
Take Time for Cross-Training
Ideally, your plant floor workers should be well rounded in their abilities. Need an extra hand on the insulating glass (IG) line? Someone from another workstation should be able to pitch in and help.
It’s not uncommon to see a production line that typically runs with about 20 or so people reduced to a skeleton crew of about 15 during the summer stretch. This makes cross-training, when you have some time on your hands, all the more critical. A vacationing line worker shouldn’t derail your production processes, and that requires you to invest in broadening the skill sets of every worker.
If your shop’s glazer or beader is off for the week, and no one else in the plant has the skills to cover that position, your production numbers will inevitably suffer and quality can be compromised. All of this can happen during the busiest part of your year. But a well-rounded staff, by contrast, should be able to pick up any slack with minimal interruptions to your anticipated production.
Evaluate Procurement Processes
Before the thick of busy season, it can be helpful to ensure the entirety of your processes are running optimally. This includes how you procure critical raw materials with your key suppliers.
Reviewing these processes can reveal little challenges or speedbumps you didn’t know were there. Ask yourself: When was the last time you paid close attention to those purchase orders? How open and accessible are your key communication channels? It’s worth pulling management teams together for this process, and it can help your entire business to run more smoothly. A reliable supplier should not only be receptive to your efforts here, but similarly invested in making improvements to these processes.
Busy season will be here before you know it. Proper preparation is a good recipe for success in the summer months, so don’t forget to be proactive while you still have the time.
Eric Thompson is national account manager for Quanex Corp. and Joe Erb is national account manager for Quanex Corp.
To view the laid-in version of this issue in our digital edition, CLICK HERE.