Continuous improvement in manufacturing is vital to help our businesses continue to grow and stay competitive in the global market. Have you thought about implementing changes to make your manufacturing process more lean? Are you working towards improving the quality of the product you manufacture? What about reducing a negative impact you may have on our environment? While these are great projects to implement, sometimes we don’t always have the funds available to actually do so.
That’s where the CME SMART Funding Program comes in.
The Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters group (CME) created the CME SMART Program with funding provided by the government of Ontario. This program was created to help small to medium sized manufacturers in Ontario improve efficiency and productivity to better compete in the global market.
How do they do this? They help fund projects that implement changes to improve your operational efficiency. These projects could include lean manufacturing and/or design, environmental impact reduction, IT best practices, quality improvement and energy efficiency. These projects should hopefully not just increase your efficiency but would change the way you do business, as well as reduce or eliminate waste (both wasted time and wasted materials) and phase out mistakes and non-value-added activities.
After getting approval from CME for the funding, these projects must be started within 2 months of your notification of selection from the CME, and should not take longer than 6 months to implement.
How much do they fund? The best projects proposed to the CME SMART Program get selected for funding, and you can receive either 50% of your project costs, or $50,000 – whichever is less.
Who is eligible? Companies with 10-500 employees that have their manufacturing operations in Ontario are eligible for the CME SMART Program. These companies would have to have been in operation in Ontario for at least two years.
Northbridge Consultants is a service provider for the CME SMART Program. We can provide you with SMART Assessments and help you implement these programs.
According to Wikipedia, “lean is centered around creating more value with less work.” Lean manufacturing is basically creating a more streamlined process where we learn from our mistakes and reduce waste – whether physical waste or wasted time. It uses both innovation and problem solving to produce better results. The concept of “lean principles” comes from the Japanese manufacturing industry.
There are many different areas that lean manufacturing principles can be applied. They are all effective when applied to your business correctly. Some of the easiest lean manufacturing principles to implement are as follows.
Waste elimination allows you to continually keep a lookout on ways that you can reduce waste. For example, to eliminate wasted products, take the time to examine the products at various stages in the manufacturing process. This way, defects can be detected before reaching the final stages of production.
Organization of the work area can definitely be of great benefit in the lean manufacturing process. This helps prevent wasted time and makes things much easier to find. The 5S Program focuses on workplace organization.
Map your processes – write down every step involved in a process. Are all of the steps necessary? Can any of them be combined or modified to be more efficient?
So how can you implement lean manufacturing principles into your own manufacturing plant?
There is no set method that is guaranteed to work in every situation. The best way to start, however, is to take a really good look at how things currently happen at your business. Analyze what the problems may be, and how you can best solve these problems. Look at challenges and opportunities. Take a look at what can be easily eliminated, or modified to work better. These will determine what processes you should use to implement the changes that need to be made. Some possible programs include the 5S Program and Kaizen.
When deciding whether to gather sr&ed information and make a sr&ed claim many companies often wonder what types of work qualifies for sr&ed tax credits. A sr&ed project is defined by the Canadian Revenue Agency as “a set of interrelated activities that collectively are necessary for the attempt to achieve the specific scientific and/or technological advance(s) defined for the project, are required to overcome scientific and/or technological uncertainty, and are pursued through a systematic investigation by means of experiment or analysis performed by qualified individuals. In order to better understand this statement we will examine its key points in further detail.
Work that sets about to achieve a specific scientific or technological advance or overcome a scientific or technological uncertainty can consist of a vast amount of tasks. In general if a company is attempting to create a new or improved product or process and the work required to do so is not standard practice it is likely that the work will qualify as sr&ed. Work to improve a product or process or create an entirely new product or process will generally contain setbacks or difficulties that must be addressed, these setbacks form the basis of the “uncertainties” that need to be overcome within a sr&ed project. By collecting information about the setbacks and difficulties that occur while trying to improve a company high quality sr&ed information will be created which can be utilized during the claim process.
The setbacks and difficulties present within a sr&ed project are often the cause of the project being completed in an iterative manner as a solution to a problem is devised, the solution tested, and the results gathered. If the solution is successful the process will be complete however if the solution requires further refinement the process must be repeated for another iteration. This iterative process will normally establish that the project has been completed in a systematic manner as the individuals working on the project will attempt to learn from each iteration how to best solve the problem.
The individuals participating in the sr&ed project as well as the collection of sr&ed information are required to be qualified in the area which they are involved in the project. The qualifications held by the individuals will be as diverse as the tasks required to perform the project. As an example a new product may be designed by an engineer but the prototype fabricated by a press operator, the engineer is qualified to design the product but not qualified to operate the press and visa versa. As we can see the work done by both individuals contributes to the completion of the product and as such sr&ed information related to the labour of both individuals should be recorded.
By better understanding what work qualifies as sr&ed and collecting the appropriate sr&ed information a stronger sr&ed claim can be made and greater rewards gained through the filing process.
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