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…)

On the one hand, you have the need for making the change to a manufacturing information system that will help you gain a competitive advantage. On the other hand, you’re faced with a wealth of anecdotal horror stories about the time and effort it takes to implement such a system. Confusion. Delays. Downtime. Many of the problems that you hear about seem to be common mantras from those companies that have had problems with ERP implementation.

By the volume of the protestations, it would appear that ERP implementation is nothing but trouble. However, it must be kept in mind that the old ’squeaky wheel’ adage rings most true here. That is to say, those majority of manufacturers that have little or no problems with ERP implementation are usually less vocal in public about their successes, while those that encounter difficulties are the first to complain.

What separates the successes from those less so? In a word: (more…)

The greatest mysteries of the ancient world usually revolve around how something was made. The Pyramids of Egypt, Greek Parthenon, and Roman Colosseum are all immense structures that required organization and many associated industries for their completion. Chances are, though, the coordination and production requirements of these wonders of the world were not much different than what we expect today in modern manufacturing.

Then, as now, resource management included labor, materials, physical plant, and administration. The mystery, of course, lies in the question of how the sheer size of these projects and the resources they necessitated allowed for successful coordination. For example, the various data centers for the building of the Pyramids, like all other great ancient structures, were geographically dispersed with, of course, no form of immediate production communication available.

We also know that ancient productions were not lean operations, and the subsequent progression of manufacturing production technique moved very slowly over the centuries. The major change in production development from Dynastic Egypt to Depression America was in the capability of (more…)

It’s hot outside on a nice summer day along an oceanfront boardwalk, and you want some ice cream. Before you are two shops—on the left a convenience store stocked with very inexpensive, packaged ice cream confections, and on the right one of those pricey marble-slab places that practically makes the ice cream from scratch in a flurried and extravagant public production of custom “ice cream building”.

Seemingly, your choices are quite limited to either the one-flavor-fits-all blandness of cheap prepackaged ice cream products that fall short of your taste needs, and the other that, while bells-and-whistles impressive, is more cost than your budget allows and far too much product than you can possibly ever consume.

Then, you spot just a little bit farther down what is, do doubt, your solution to this conundrum of ice cream extremes. It is a (more…)

What is manufacturing without motion? Not much, really. In a 24 - 7 world where time is a boundless concept, and the ability to profitably produce is determined by the maximization of capacity, remaining in motion is often the key to success for any manufacturer. To be sure, this concept of motion is not to be confused with the quantitative output of inferior products merely for the sake of meeting output quotas.

To the extent that output is the result of a combination of quantity and quality, this means that capacity is maximized and customer satisfaction maintained. In short, motion is central to manufacturing, and the more continuous it is the better. To this end, the concept of cell-system manufacturing was developed to produce the best quality product in the most efficient possible way.

The idea behind cell-system production is to provide a continuous flow of produced goods through the absence of delays in the process. It is a notion of producing one quality item at a time, and to have those items continuously moving off the production line and in route to the customer—in short, one-piece flow.

Central to the idea of one-piece flow manufacturing is the concept (more…)

Remember when it was just you, your garage, and a single fabricating job each week from that one company who saw potential in your work? Costing, for you then, was simply a matter of getting the work done as quickly as possible with the lowest investment in material and no inventory at all. Talk about “just in time” production. Often it was more like “just in in the nick of time” when it came to getting in another work order to keep the electricity on or bread on the table.

My, how things have changed as you’ve grown into a 60,000 square foot job shop with 80 employees, and dozens of work orders coming in each day. What used to be a simple costing formula (i.e., price charged – material cost = profit), involves so many variables it can make your head spin.

Of course, you wouldn’t have gotten to this point without a progressive improvement in the way you assigned costs to jobs. You came to understand that costs include more than just materials; they include (more…)

It should be the case that, in manufacturing, having an abundance of work is a good thing. Labor and machinery are running at full capacity, finished goods are moving through the plant as fast as new work orders are being generated, and production efficiencies are enhancing the bottom line.

However, when abundance turns to overloading, labor and machinery often have a hard time keeping up. Sure, fresh work orders are coming in fast, but the ability to produce product is exceeded by the time available to actually manufacture the goods and adhere to quality standards.

There is only so much time available in the day, and if machines are running full capacity all the time, then there will inevitably be (more…)

Manufacturers are increasingly feeling the pressure of doing more with less and in a shorter period of time. Lead times decrease as work loads increase. Furthermore, matured global competition means that the bottom-line is being bombarded by tighter and tighter margins. To combat these forces against profit, manufacturers have turned to gaining greater productivity through the reductions of waste in the system; that is, to find efficiencies in the manufacturing process where profits are squeezed out of production itself.

To this end, total enterprise resource planning (ERP) is the name of the modern manufacturing game. Within the context of ERP, “single input” concepts mean that an organization hopefully moves and thinks as one. (more…)

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) is a mode of manufacturing built upon the notion of a single software program serving the needs of all aspects of the operation. In strict terms, the true ambition of ERP is to integrate all departments and functions across a manufacturer through the single-source software program, while eliminating departmental standalone computer systems.

It is hoped that such integration will facilitate the sharing of the same real-time data simultaneously to all areas of the plant, thus coordinating decision-making processes and outcomes. To this end, an ERP approach can have significant on-time delivery improvements and positive ROI–if, the software is installed properly, integrated system-wide, and correctly utilized in operation. (more…)

After the age of the craftsmen, when the Industrial Revolution began to pump out products in mass, time became a critical issue with regards to production in manufacturing. No longer could products be made according to an arbitrary or infinite time-frame for production. With the introduction of mass manufacturing, production mandates and quotas were increasingly created according to the notion of how much time it should take to make x number of items.

The idea gave rise to business efficiency theories and models such as Frederick Taylor’s time-motion studies in the early 1900’s, and Frank Gilbreth’s one best way production mode of scientific management in the 1950’s. (more…)