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…)

It used to be the case in job shop manufacturing that when something needed to be done, the information relating to the task was passed along the line with paper forms. Dispatch lists, routers, schedules, requisitions, and job orders were written down on hardcopies.

However, hardcopy forms often proved to be inflexible pains to change if there were hiccups in the system. Furthermore, there was always a disconnection between areas like scheduling, shop floor work centers, inventory, and shipping.

In the old days of paper forms, there was the constant problem of miscommunication—everyone in the plant was not always on the same page. The results were (more…)

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) for manufacturing is, in short, the consolidation of a series of interconnected processes that when added together efficiently produce a finished product. In turn, each process has its own certain requirements that are specific to their area function—its own way of “doing things”.

For example, inventory management involves the processes of acquiring, storing, and distributing parts and other raw material to the various aspects of the operation. Shipping entails packaging and transportation of finished goods. In each instance, procedures should be developed in such a way that (more…)

One of the toughest parts of total enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementation in manufacturing is, perhaps, the efficient collection, storing, and analysis of data. Whether information comes from the shop floor in terms of employee time, work in progress or materials inventory, or from departments such as master scheduling or shipping, the wide variety of operational areas in a plant calls for the centralization of information. Such a notion is at the very heart of Lean manufacturing, and it is one that is important in contemporary “pull production” manufacturing operations.

Of course, the centralization of data collection for use in manufacturing software means there must be centralized data collection points useable throughout a plant. The Graphical User Interface (GUI) terminal is a tool that gives shop employees a centralized port to input and interpret production data quickly and easily.

It is more important than ever that (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…)