Every machine shop wants to deliver products faster, decrease waste and expense, and increase profit margins. But most hit the same wall, and struggle defining how to increase throughput in manufacturing.
You can’t overcome bottlenecks and bad schedules. And, on top of that, poor throughput control creates chaos on the shop floor, in the office, and with your customers.
Most shops try to fix this by rescheduling or pushing harder. But the real answer here is better throughput, supported by manufacturing production scheduling software. These solutions help you avoid bottlenecks and meet delivery goals using real-time status tracking, “Must Leave By” dates, and built-in capacity planning.
The impact of unified manufacturing software is significant. The system functions as a centralized ecosystem where all critical job data is connected. As a result, production scheduling is driven by accurate, real-time job costing and inventory data. Therefore, you lay the foundation to improve shop throughput.
“We’re able to schedule with less work than before, allowing our staff to spend more time on the floor instead of updating spreadsheets or chasing info. It’s also freed up our managers—they no longer need to get updates from other departments. Now, anyone can just log into ProShop and easily find the answers they need.”
— Justin Quinn, President, Focused on Machining
Here are five proven ways on how to increase throughput in manufacturing and align your scheduling and production to growth.
1. Eliminate bottlenecks with real-time scheduling visibility
The most effective strategy for eliminating bottlenecks is having real-time, shop-wide scheduling visibility. You see exactly what you’re running, what’s in your queue, and where you could have delays before they happen. You’re proactive with managing workflows, keeping jobs on schedule and avoiding bottlenecks. It’s one of the best approaches on how to increase throughput in manufacturing.
Here’s what that might look like in your shop. As the production manager, you see idle machines and operators waiting for material, setups, or direction. Hours can easily disappear before cutting begins.
Without integrated job quoting software tied to capacity, your estimators can promise lead times the floor can’t meet or pad quotes so high you lose the job. Either way, you inherit a schedule that never works.
Your admins absorb the fallout. Customers call for updates, and without live data, admins chase travelers and spreadsheets, not answers.
The key to achieving this visibility is creating a single source of truth. Using a centralized manufacturing execution system (MES), all job scheduling data lives in one connected, paperless hub. Job quotes are grounded with real capacity data, keeping promises realistic. Admins can instantly pull job status reports and answer customer questions in seconds.
“Before ProShop, we were late 20% of the time on orders due to over scheduling and materials that weren’t arriving on time. Now, we’re able to maintain 95% on-time delivery. This has helped us make more money and take on more work.”
— Jason Baldonado, Owner, Prime Manufacturing
With scheduling visibility, you can ensure your machines cut more hours per shift, stop jobs from piling up at bottlenecks, and give customers delivery dates that hold.
2. Reduce setup times with better tooling, fixtures, job kitting, and work instructions
The best machine shops ask how to increase throughput in manufacturing continuously, not as a one-time task. They leverage proven tactics like single-minute exchange of die (SMED), standardized digital work instructions, and pre-kitting jobs. These best practices help reduce setup times in manufacturing and reclaim hours of valuable working time.
Without a centralized MES, you deal with inconsistent setup times for the same job. One operator is fast; another is slow. Because there’s no standard process, your schedule is entirely unreliable.
Your estimators add huge buffers to set up estimates just to be safe. This inflates quotes and makes you less competitive on repeat work. These jobs you should easily win, not miss out on due to poor scheduling data.
Instead, shift your priorities and commit to a continuous throughput optimization system. Centralize all operational data in one place to better manage tool libraries, link job work instructions, and create job kitting checklists. Link all these elements into digital workflows to eliminate paper travelers and setup delays.
“Everything is under one roof. It’s not 5–6 different systems anymore. Now the shop crew has a full feedback loop. They can give us information, we can give them information. It’s all real-time…we can’t imagine living without it.”
— Justin Erikson, Owner, Irongate Machine
Digital work instructions ensure every operator has step-by-step, media-rich instructions to brief your team. Similarly, all job kitting stages, materials, and tools are all available before work begins.
3. Improve machine utilization
A core tenet of lean manufacturing is that if spindles aren’t turning, your shop isn’t earning. Improving machine utilization helps measure accurate spindle uptime, creating greater productivity and control over your whole shop. Also, you avoid the inaccurate, time-consuming limitations of manual job tracking.
As the production manager, inaccurate downtime data creates more questions about setups, maintenance, or operator inefficiency. You can’t answer simple questions like, “What was our true spindle uptime last week?” That makes it nearly impossible to set meaningful improvement goals.
Your estimators build quotes based on ideal run times. But on the floor, actual performance wildly varies. With poor machine utilization, every quote becomes a gamble. You risk profitability because job scheduling isn’t reflective of how machines perform.
Consequently, your admins struggle to reconcile job costs after a finished project. They spend hours trying to determine if a job was profitable because no one knows the actual machine time for that job, making financial reporting a work of fiction.
“Everything is connected and in one place. Technical help is quick and easy and it comes from people who have been in your shoes and worked in manufacturing.”
— Jereme Rogers, Owner, Axis CNC
Forward-thinking shops leverage a MES to automatically track spindle time, indirect time, and job progress. With MES dashboards, your teams get live visibility, and the system can flag missing material or programs before downtime hits. The shop floor management & scheduling module optimizes workflows, while the job costing & financial data module monitors actual machine time to provide real-time financial insights.
4. Standardize processes to avoid repeated mistakes
A foundational best practice for any high-performing shop is process standardization. Without it, the same preventable errors return, eat up time, force rework, and drain throughput. When solving for how to increase throughput in manufacturing and improving job scheduling, you need to address these challenges head-on.
Your goal should be to create a system where your team captures best practices. An all-in-one manufacturing software eliminates tribal knowledge, converting best practices into standard operations.
Without a standardization process, you lose a lot of valuable growth time babysitting jobs to stop problems instead of streamlining production. Your estimators can’t rely on past data when every process varies. That guesswork risks profits on future jobs. And, your admins waste time patching compliance records when documentation is inconsistent or incomplete.
“We existed on tribal knowledge for almost 30 years. We just existed—but we wanted to thrive. ProShop is helping us at B&W Machine Works Inc. document those tricks of the trade, eliminate waste, and revolutionize our profit margins.”
— Joanne Trumbauer, President, B&W Machine Works
Instead, use your product data management module to build a single source of truth. This is an invaluable best practice to ensure all parts meet compliance standards. You’ll reduce audit prep by up to 96%, and pass final audits with flying colors. Additionally, audit-ready quality control and full traceability ensure all products are delivered on time and budget.
5. Use throughput to scale future growth
Many shops treat throughput gains like patches. The best treat them like growth engines.
The most strategic best practice is to view throughput optimization as a way to unlock capacity without increasing overhead. This mindset shifts the focus from merely fixing problems to actively scaling your business.
As the production manager, you can easily get stuck in a reactive loop. What you need is a system that eliminates bottlenecks, streamlines processes, unifies data, and provides built-in capacity planning. All these steps make hidden capacity visible and actionable.
In many shops, estimators can’t confidently bid on larger, higher-volume jobs. They don’t trust their shop’s current capacity to handle a significant increase in demand without creating chaos on the floor.
Your admins are stuck acting like a cost center. They’re overloaded with manual data entry and fixing issues inefficient systems create. All of this prevents your key players from contributing to scalable growth activities.
By adopting integrated manufacturing software, all quotes are grounded in real shop capacity and verifiable data. Your estimating & quoting module helps you win more jobs with smart bids backed up by real-time financial insights. Therefore, you seamlessly quote with speed, confidence, and higher margins.
“ProShop was one of the best business decisions we’ve ever made. We’ve seen huge improvements in places we never expected. It’s been a total game changer for us.”
— Kody Guidry, General Manager, Coastal Machine
The payoff for your shop? You grow revenue without adding new machines. You win more quotes more often, which is the kind of ROI shops expect from a manufacturing system built for growth.
The business benefits of aligning throughput and scheduling
Shops that successfully align throughput and scheduling see dramatic business improvements. High performance metrics become the norm — such as 95% on-time delivery, setup reduction times of 50%, and job lead times shortened by 30%.
These results are fueled by higher machine utilization and streamlined processes. You’ll eliminate bottlenecks and have more reliable on-time delivery rates, further driving growth without increasing overhead.
This optimization is only possible through a centralized ecosystem, storing all critical job data in one connected, paperless hub. Using a purpose-built manufacturing software, you’ll unlock greater production capacity, driving up to a 25% increase in throughput and verifiable ROI in a six-month timeframe.
Stop patching problems and start scaling your operations. Ready to turn process standardization into your growth engine? Book a call to see how ProShop can transform your shop floor efficiency today.