When your in-house production falls behind, it almost never starts as a crisis. It begins as a few late orders and a growing backlog that you always feel like will eventually get done the next week. But then that looming list becomes your new normal.
At some point, you have to come to grips with the fact that the real issue might not be demand. Instead, it may be throughput. You’re making promises/sales faster than you’re producing finished goods, and the gap keeps widening unless you change how work flows through the building.
The fix to this problem usually has two parts: (1) Tighten up your internal system so you’re not wasting capacity you already have, and (2) Build a realistic overflow plan so growth doesn’t break you.
Let’s take a look at several proactive steps you can take:
1. Identify the Source of the Problem
Before you change anything, you need to know where the constraint lives. Many companies assume the bottleneck is “the whole floor” when it’s really one step: a cure time, a changeover, a test process, a packaging station, a single machine that’s always down, or a department that’s understaffed. If you don’t identify that constraint, you’ll spend money and effort in areas that aren’t limiting output.
A practical way to find it is to follow a product order from start to finish and track where it waits. Waiting is the signal. If work-in-process stacks up in front of one operation, that’s your constraint. If everything moves smoothly until it hits inspection, your constraint might be quality capacity, not production capacity. Once you’ve found the point that’s limiting throughput, you can make targeted changes that actually move the needle.
2. Reduce Changeovers
In many plants, the quiet killer is changeover time. Every time you switch a line, swap tooling, clean equipment, or adjust settings, you’re spending time producing nothing. A certain amount of setup is unavoidable, but a lot of it is preventable.
Start by measuring it. If you don’t know how long changeovers take, you can’t improve them. Then look for the easy wins:
- Staging materials ahead of time
- Keeping tools organized
- Standardizing adjustments
- Creating clear setup checklists that reflect how the best operators actually do the work
You need your changeovers to become consistent, which will eventually mean they become faster. And when they become faster, everything else becomes so much more predictable (from a manufacturing perspective).
3. Build Better SOPs
When production is behind, teams often rely on informal knowledge. The problem is that informal knowledge doesn’t scale. It lives in a few people’s heads, and those people become single points of failure. If they’re out, quality drifts and cycle times stretch. If they’re training someone new, output slows to a screeching halt.
What you need are clear work instructions and standard operating procedures (SOPs) for the steps that drive quality and speed. The best ones are visual, short, and specific. They show the critical settings, the common mistakes, and the standard checks that prevent rework. The goal is to make good work repeatable across shifts and across new hires.
4. Be Proactive With Better Maintenance
When you’re behind, equipment downtime feels personal, like it’s stealing hours you can’t afford to lose. But a lot of downtime isn’t random. It’s the result of issues like delayed maintenance or unclear ownership.
You don’t need a perfect maintenance program to improve output. You do, however, need a consistent one. Start with the most critical equipment and build simple preventive checks into the shift routine. You should also keep spare parts on hand for high-failure items.
5. Know When to Outsource
Even with internal improvements, there are times when outsourcing is the smartest way to protect lead times and customer relationships. The key is to be deliberate with how you approach it. Outsourcing shouldn’t be a move you make out of panic. It needs to be a part of your plan to scale.
A good rule is to outsource when demand exceeds what you can produce without sacrificing quality, safety, or on-time delivery. That might be seasonal demand, a sudden growth spike, or a large one-off order that would disrupt your normal schedule. Outsourcing can also make sense when your bottleneck is something that is way too expensive to quickly expand on your own.
One outsourcing route that fits many manufacturers is toll manufacturing services, where a partner runs your product through their equipment and process to handle overflow capacity. This can be useful when you want to keep your core operations internal but need temporary or flexible expansion without building new lines.
Setting Your Business Up for True Growth
It’s one thing to increase sales volume. It’s another to scale up your production and actually meet that sales volume without causing frustrated customers and employees.
When in-house production can’t keep up, the worst move is pretending it’ll fix itself. You don’t necessarily need to overhaul everything overnight, but you do need to act with intent. Find the bottlenecks and look for more efficient ways to deal with the underlying problems. From there, you can scale with purpose.
