When facing competition—particularly fierce competition—it’s important to know all you can about your adversary and their weapons, the battlefield on which the fight will take place, and the best time to strike or retreat. In other words, knowledge is power, and the ability to remain flexible and fast to emerging or changing developments is a tremendous tactical advantage. This notion of changeability is at the heart of new movements in manufacturing based in production agility.

While certainly a modern business concept, agile manufacturing goes beyond simply being another version of 1980’s-styled computer integrated manufacturing or 1990’s lean manufacturing. Rather, agile manufacturing represents a complete shift in the mindset of production industries in the 21^st Century; one in which there is both a greater relationship between technology and worker skills, and greater customer access to, and demands upon, the core competencies of their manufacturers/vendors.

The basic concept of agile manufacturing is to develop what could best be called a nimble mindset when it comes to understanding market environments. In short, rapid changes in the market environment are not (more…)

Taking a simple Sunday drive down a road through the countryside, there are many things you depend upon to get you where you’re going. Most are common to all drivers. You need good tires, windows, seats, perhaps an air conditioner, and certainly a solid body. These are the essentials that in various states of repair have little bearing on the efficient functions of the car by which it sustains forward motion. However, start talking about the engine these days and you’ll get an earful regarding notions such as fuel efficiency, pollution control efficiency, maintenance efficiency, and so forth. Less common from driver to driver, car to car, are the various types and conditions of car engines, but it is the engine upon which all drivers depend the greatest to get them where they are going. As opposed to seats and seat condition, a less efficient engine simply means a less efficient car.

In this same sense, manufacturers are very dependent upon each other to be efficient in their operations—your performance is often dependent upon the performance of your upstream suppliers, while downstream your customers depend on you for their own performance levels. It is a circuitous feeding chain that traditionally has relied up on the sustaining of on-hand inventories to keep ahead of demand. With the introduction of lean manufacturing came the elimination of large inventories and the need for greater (more…)

The plant is running smoothly, all machines are operating at capacity and scrap has been reduced to the lowest levels experienced in the history of the plant. The shop schedule is running fine due to the introduction of an enterprise resource planning software system—but something just doesn’t seem right. The expected ROI is falling a bit short of expectations and on-time delivery is still not what it should be. You wonder what it is you’ve overlooked, what area of the operation is throwing the proverbial kink in the works.

Then, one day, you just happen through the front office and it’s as if you had been shot through with a bolt of lightening. All around you are the vestiges of what you had been trying to eliminate on the shop floor. Paperwork batches, duplicated efforts, long searches for missing or incomplete data in files. In short, while the company had considered no-stone-left-unturned in its quest for shop floor efficiency through enterprise resource planning, it had not completely considered the impact a wasteful front office would have upon the ROI. Indeed, front office waste is a considerable reason why many enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementations take longer than expected to complete.

What can you do to ensure a successful and quick implementation of your ERP software system, and maximize your ROI? See how process improvements can be made in the front office. Here are four helpful tips: (more…)

The contemporary value chain in manufacturing is a fairly simple concept to describe: get the right products where they are supposed to go, as quickly as possible, and at the right price for yourself and your customer. It’s a set of activities wherein products pass through, gaining value at each step of the process. This is not to say that the actual cost of each step is assigned as a specific value to the products passing though the chain. Some processes may be low cost activities that add much greater value to the product than that cost amount incurred in the production step.

Take, for instance, the production of artificial heart motors. The motor itself is a relatively low cost production item that, when included in the whole package of the heart, adds a larger increased value to the finished good. Indeed, by definition value chain activities are designed to create value in a product that, hopefully, exceeds the cost of producing that value. The difference between the actual cost of producing the value and the added value amount itself is where profit is located.

Since the late 1980’s, these value-adding activities have included inbound logistics (receiving/warehousing/inventory), operations (production), outbound logistics (warehousing/fulfillment/shipping), marketing/sales (advertising/pricing), and service (customer support). For the manufacturer, any or all of the activities present opportunities for creating (more…)