It’s impossible to leave a customer alone.  They’re either yours, or they’re somebody else’s.  In fact, in the course of doing business, the constant struggle is for the acquisition and maintenance of as many good quality customers as you can get-those that fit your prescribed profile of what it takes for them to need you in terms of product or service. 

This needs-based connection between vendor and customer is what in business we’ve come to know as the “relationship”, and it is at the heart of customer relationship management software systems, otherwise known as CRM. 

There are many approaches to CRM, but ultimately when a company talks about the process they’re almost always referring to sales force automation or …Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re still using paper in the front office and on the shop floor (routers, schematics, timeclock, etc.), then you probably have some room for efficiency improvements. In fact, there are many manufacturers whose business practices and information systems are still built around the idea of moving paper documents though the course of their production processes. Paperwork is both a fragile and relatively bulky medium, and inevitably the slow moving information it contains will either be archived in space-consuming files or lost through extensive and often careless shop floor handling.

To counter these negative tendencies, manufacturing technology has advanced paper reduction techniques through digital mediums and storage. With digital media, massive amounts of information can be stored in one very small, very central location for immediate and simultaneous withdrawal of real-time data.

To be sure, some manufacturing operations are still comfortable functioning with paper. The reengineering of business practices is never an easy thing to do, and often the maintaining of a successful status quo seems to be the easiest thing to do. However, as more and more companies see the value of waste reduction in lean approaches to manufacturing, supply chain management, shortened lead times, and global competition all mean that …Read the rest of this entry »

What is cycle time to you? A process that your inventory manager makes happen on occasion? Some arbitrary notion of a period between output from workcenter to workcenter? A concept only loosely connected to scheduling, performance, and supplier relations? If your idea of cycle time is that of a business procedure that’s only marginally important when compared to the myriad other tasks involved in manufacturing—then, you may want to rethink that thought.

Vital to positive bottomlines, cycle time reduction also reduces costs, lowers inventory levels, improves production scheduling and throughput predictability, improves customer satisfaction, and can even result in a better quality product. Indeed, if there were one operational issue you had to focus on to improve overall profits, in a world concerned with speed of manufacture that issue would be …Read the rest of this entry »

In the age of an electronically connected global economy, where capital travels from nation to nation at the speed of light, swimming afloat in the supply stream is not always easy. It really doesn’t matter what sort of business your in, globalization of the supply chain means that if you’re not ready and in it, your business is simply and quickly passed by for one that is. Manufacturers, wholesalers, distributors, retailers—there’s no discrimination when it comes to the instant gratification of the consumer demand. With the maturity of enterprise resource planning software (ERP), the expectations are for vendors to operate lean in order to respond rapidly and with a cost-effective value.

It is certainly true that, because of ever-tightening margins, wasteful production practices are no longer tolerated. Instead, producers and providers are expected to run lean, a process of streamlining production and distribution to reduce and eliminate waste or non-value activities to the process. In a broader sense, one could extrapolate this philosophy out to the larger supply chain as well as focus it into the movement of products within the supply chain. In other words, connectivity also means that the stream of supply must flow with as few impediments as possible. At the same time, any processes that stop supply chain flow must be steady and unceasing, and processes that use inventory should always …Read the rest of this entry »

It’s an unfortunate fact of the manufacturing life that customers are increasingly demanding lower costs for seemingly perfectly produced products, and delivered on-time—every time. And, never mind the excuses for not performing. Today, customer loyalty is often a vacuous concept and any dissatisfaction at all simply becoming a matter of clients moving along to next vendor in line who promises the desired delivery. At its root, the bane of most manufacturers is excessively long order-to-delivery cycle times, even when efforts have been made to streamline production systems.

In lean models of manufacturing, wasted time means wasted opportunities to gain efficiency. Evidence of the waste of time is everywhere in the system and often takes the form of waiting for something to happen. The shop floor waits on sales orders to get processed, machine operators wait for engineering documents to update or clear, bottlenecks form in the production line, material delivery is slowed during inventory searches, and the list of waiting maladies goes on and on. Just remember that waiting—any waiting—keeps making the order-to-delivery cycle time longer than it really needs to be. And, longer order-to-delivery cycle times nibble into valuable, and narrower, margins.

Another factor in extending the order-to-delivery cycle time, to the point of bottom-line profit erosion, is that …Read the rest of this entry »

It was once a giant leap forward for a growing job shop to move from manual stock control and accounting of shop operations to something a bit more computerized, such as Excel spreadsheets. In time, though, the rising business experienced even more expansion and with it the need to bring all facets of the operation into a single-source system of information control. Now, spreadsheets with old information delivered from diverse sources all around the shop simply would no longer work. Constant issues of organization, freshness of data, lack of real time information flow challenged efficiency. The time eventually came for total enterprise resource planning, or ERP.

The installation of a system-wide, ERP software solution is not a simple task. To succeed, the project has several needs that must be satisfied in order for payback to come to fruition. Indeed, implementation of a new ERP system means dedication to the project by all employees—without their diligence in using it only partial rewards will be gained. First and foremost among the ERP implementation needs is an executive championing the project. In short, ERP implementation is not just an IT project—it’s a …Read the rest of this entry »

It’s a given that in manufacturing today, your customers are more demanding and insist on only the best products at lower prices, and delivered in the shortest time. If this is what you’re facing as a production reality (and, no doubt you are doing so in today’s pressing economy), streamlining your operation is of absolute necessity in meeting customer demands. In streamlining, a manufacturer engages processes that are not always the fastest but rather those with the fewest production activities that do not add value to the product. That is to say, streamlining is a transformative event in which the product becomes improved through a process (or processes).

Whether it’s milling a chunk of wood into a table leg, or creating a child’s lunchbox out of pressed metal, hinges, decals, and screws, creating a useful product from basic elements/efforts is adding value to it. To identify and eliminate (or at least reduce) non-value-added activity in production are the keys to streamlining a manufacturing process, and by extension the decreasing of largely unnecessary production/management costs.

Streamlining a manufacturing operation is not a complicated thing—and the benefits of even implementing the basic efforts at the process far outweigh the costs of doing so. You can begin by first getting an idea of how your operation is flowing. Imagine your production operation as …Read the rest of this entry »

So, you think your job shop is completely lean? Or, perhaps, you’re ready to go lean but are lacking a sense of which direction you need to turn to start the transition. In either case, the one absolute rule to remember is that no manufacturer or job shop can ever be perfectly lean. As an integral element of its philosophy, continuous improvement implies that refinement in processes—from efficiencies in movement to the reduction of waste—can always be found. The bottom-line is that unless every activity of the company adds value to the product of that company, there will be areas of continuous lean improvement to be found.

Knowing that the job will never be completely finished, but realizing there are going to be positive returns from the effort, you decide to jump in and make the transition into leaning your operation. Where do you start? You start from the ground up—you turn toward your people to believe in the effort, for without their positive attitude no lean project can succeed. From there, lean movement will spread in the way business gets done. In other words, the human touch is something no machine can do on its own. For lean to be successful, the workforce must be invested in the lean process in order to identify both large and small workflow and waste problems. The workforce through understanding and agreement, not coercion, must adopt lean principles.

One of the biggest misconceptions about going lean is that …Read the rest of this entry »

As a manufacturer, plant manager, controller, or machine operator, you’ve undoubtedly encountered the concept of lean production. Lean this, lean that—lectures, brochures, talks, forums about how lean approaches to shop management can control and even reduce costs. In today’s era of ever tightening margins, where even the slightest gains in efficiency can translate into considerable improvements to the bottom-line, lean manufacturing has become not only a way of life but also a philosophy in and of itself. Imagine the repetitive production line where pennies saved per part or assembly sometimes translate into thousands of dollars per hour put back into the plus side of the ledger.

In prior postings, we’ve listed benefits of leaning, as well as some of the broad waste concepts associated with lean philosophy in manufacturing. In this article, we will nuance some of items in those prior lists and offer more specifics as to the meaning of “waste” in production. With an eye toward operating within a lean structure, identifying potential areas of waste and continuously improving production through their elimination is what efficient manufacturing is all about:

Over-Production – In short, selling products at or below cost of production is …Read the rest of this entry »