Remaining in play is the name of the game in manufacturing competition today. That is to say, to find the orders that keep things going, and going well, you have to be on the field with your competitors in the first place. That’s where the action is found, that’s where potential customers come to look for services, parts, and products. Through consolidation, however, the competition is changing. The days of parity, where niches were carved to pinpoint exactly what you and your competitors were all about, are becoming fewer and fewer. To remain in play in manufacturing today, a company must often introduce flexibility into their shop floor operations. Once a novel notion, flexible manufacturing is increasingly taking hold as both a practice in the shop and a philosophical approach for management.

Manufacturers no longer work in isolation from each other; rather, they usually exist as part and parcel of a large supply chain whereby the degree of success of one partner is driven by the reciprocal success of the others. Throughout the supply chain, the potential for downstream producers being flexible in their production activities means that unless you are equally dynamic you could easily lose the work as the upstream partner. This concept is more fully considered as customizability whereby operations must be (more…)

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 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…)

The modus operandi of a fast-food hamburger joint is to have a burger already prepared and ready to go when or if a customer asks for it. The bad news here, of course, is that without some sense of how long a particular burger may have been in the “finished goods” inventory (i.e., under the red lamps), there is the distinct possibility that your product may be cold and obsolete by the time you receive and consume it.

On the other hand, at some fancy-schmancy gourmet-burger place, where all is custom and only made once the order is in and confirmed, you may have quite a wait between placing your purchase order and taking delivery of the product. In each operation, the inherent pitfalls of inventory management are factors of lead time—with fast food, too much of it, and gourmet not enough.

To bring a product or service to a customer requires not only the material in which to do it, but information that will give a sense of what and when that material will be needed. In short, efficient manufacturing requires that (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…)

It seems to often be the case that as your manufacturing operation grows, the measurement of the efficiency of your performance becomes ever harder. When sales orders go up work in progress (WIP) increases, when inventory builds turnaround diminishes—all to the detriment of grasping how efficient or profitable each process is. To a certain degree, enterprise resource planning software (ERP) has helped in providing a continuous status assessment via the input of real time data from all operation aspects. ERP software, for this reason, is a valuable tool for the continuous improvement necessary for the modern lean manufacturer.

However, some assessment of financial, behavioral, and core process performances should be made on an on-going basis to provide mutually supporting testimony to the total continuous improvement ERP efforts of the company. For this reason, lean metrics have been established to allow a company to measure, evaluate, and respond to their performance in such a way that it does not sacrifice quality to satisfy quantity objectives, or increase inventory levels to achieve machine efficiencies. Often, these metrics are a means to discover (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…)

If you’ve ever owned a car, you know the importance that maintenance has in keeping things rolling. With any machinery such as a car, it is a sort of “pay me now or pay me later” mentality where the idea of regular upkeep, ahead of any breakdowns, means that costly and time consuming downtime for repairs is hopefully prevented from occurring.

In other words, preventive maintenance is designed to: 1) predict the onset of machine or component failures; 2) detect failures before they have any significant impact on manufacturing operations; and 3) repair (or replace) the machine(s) or component(s) before the failure occurs.

Indeed, by scheduling the preventive maintenance of machinery on our terms and in our schedule, we can plan in advance for a short term downtime during the most convenient time available to us; that is, for a day or time when, perhaps, the asset is (more…)

When industrial visionaries create improvements in manufacturing technique far ahead of their time, reluctance to change is the common response of managers comfortable with traditional, production methods.

From Adam Smith’s eighteenth century “pin factory” to Frederick Taylor’s “scientific management” in the nineteenth century, and Henry Ford’s twentieth century “mass production” to Taichi Ohno’s contemporary “pull production” model, shop floor operation has been in constant evolution. In all of these periods of change, it has often been the early adopters of emerging manufacturing techniques who have enjoyed great benefits over their competitors.

Those benefits often result in increased market share, profit margins, or both, from enhanced efficiencies in the manufacturing process. In many job shops, make-to-order, or mixed mode manufacturers, these efficiencies in production are (more…)