We’re working three 12 hour shifts at our machining company. We find productivity goes down in the overtime shift. We need to increase our efficiency because some new work is coming in. Our staff prefers a three day work week and we don’t want to add more people. Anybody got an opinion? Does overtime work well for most companies?
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Trouble being productive on overtime.
(3 posts) (3 voices)-
Posted 2 years ago #
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We're working four 10-hour days (Mon - Thurs). If we need overtime, we do it on Friday and/or Saturday. Our productivity remains high on OT. Our experience is that a 12-hour day is too long for productive work. People are just too exhausted to keep up the pace and/or produce quality parts. We also increased our capacity by adopting a Theory of Constraints based scheduling system. This effectively eliminated OT, which is how we were able to go to the four day week.
Posted 2 years ago # -
Sounds like someone needs to make an executive decision.
In my experience any more than two hours of O.T. ,regulary, breeds complacancy.(more than two hours O.T. is o.k., as long as it is not the norm). Try switching to 4 ten hour shifts- this should ease fatigue and give you basis for compromise with your crew. The crew needs to be led by a decisive management staff.
Additionally,if your work load is truly due to increase with new work coming in, you may consider a second shift in the interest of "RUN TIME", and your bottom line.Posted 2 years ago #
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