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 …Read the rest of this entry »

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 …Read the rest of this entry »

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 …Read the rest of this entry »

What could be better than being just in time for somewhere you were scheduled to be or a task you had to do? That is to say, you were not too early on arrival, wasting valuable time standing around doing nothing. Nor were you too late to the task, not being able to complete on schedule that which you were asked to do.

In short, wouldn’t it be the best case scenario for you to produce the right task at precisely the right time to maximize both your time and productivity? This notion is the concept behind the philosophy of lean manufacturing referred to as “just-in-time”, or JIT production.

In JIT production, we are seeking to eliminate costs that add no value to the final product. It is certain that without critical thought applied to a manufacturing system as a whole, the potential for waste in process is heightened. These forms of waste can include …Read the rest of this entry »

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 …Read the rest of this entry »

From the production of the smallest nut, to the development of massive rigging assemblies, all items and processes that go into the making of the part, piece, or assembly must be accounted for. Without this knowledge, margins are lost and profitability is a function of guesswork. In the past, the accounting of manpower, material, and machinery was the result of painstaking, though often erroneous, handwritten data in the form of charts and reports. The collection of this data would take days to complete and weeks to assess. In the age of massive batch (make-to-stock) inventory production, blunders in data tallies or the absence of complete information had only a rippling effect on what was largely the quantitative appreciation of manufacturing in the Industrial Revolution.

Today, however, with make-to-order and the job shop manufacturing environments, specialized and small batch production means more emphasis must be placed on margins—today, it is often quality over quantity. Quality control, in fact, is the name of the manufacturing game. For this reason, labor and resources must …Read the rest of this entry »

With the advancement of enterprise resource planning (ERP) in manufacturing, the turn was made by software developers to build a better way of maintaining inventory. In the past, inventory control was less “control” and more “guessing” as a result of delays in data entry. Before coordination through ERP methods, inventory clerks were ensconced in a paper-based systems that depended very much upon the completion and filing of paper-based inventory forms. Inventory dispositions were often not completely known for 24 hours or so—if ever.

When poor inventory control is combined with poor management in other aspects of manufacturing (selling, purchasing, scheduling, production, shipping, etc.), the results can be disastrous. Indeed, for any defined trading period, it is vital that …Read the rest of this entry »

The whole point of acquiring an ERP software system for your manufacturing operation is to improve productivity. Indeed, the whole reason for managing a manufacturing operation is to improve productivity wherever and whenever it can be improved. To this end, we expect the acquisition of an ERP software system to provide a continuous savings that results in a high ROI. In short: An ERP software system should not only do what its designed to do (plan the resources of an enterprise), but should do so at effective cost of ownership. Otherwise, what’s the point?

To ensure satisfying the ultimate ROI goals of ERP acquisition, manufacturers must understand that bringing any ERP system into their operation requires that every employee be invested in the success of the system. This investment is a result of what is called the implementation of the system throughout the operation. From the front office to the shop floor, from the president to the shipping packers, for an ERP system to work it must …Read the rest of this entry »

Multiple Affiliate Management through Global Shop Solutions  

Read Part 1 Here

Calnetix’ growth has been so dynamic that it nearly tripled its employee base in 18 months. The growing pains associated with rapid expansion also cropped up in executive management. Controlling time and attendance, costing, scheduling, and other factors, was much easier with 20 or 30 employees rather than 90 or 95. Potential problems are compounded exponentially as affiliates spin-off and come online.

Working across multiple databases with dozens of schedules out of sync defined the need for a single ERP system capable of bringing all of the data under one single-view “home base” control. For Calnetix’ executive management, the new GS Dashboard is the best tool they’ve found for centralized ERP and MRP control.

Calnetix has continued its success due to the flexibility Global Shop’s ERP system has afforded them over the years.

According to Calnetix CFO Ian Hart, the flexibility built into Global Shop interfaces very well with …Read the rest of this entry »

Calnetix-R&D and ERP

If you think that keeping a major manufacturing operation running smoothly from day to day is a hard thing to do, try running four major manufacturing operations at the same time and under one roof. This is the challenge for Calnetix, a Cerritos, California, company that is a world leader in developing and manufacturing high speed electric motors and generators.

Much of the technology that Calnetix uses in their products is the result of their own significant research and development (R&D) efforts into the development of frictionless magnetic bearing technologies, known as high-speed permanent magnet radial-flux machines. The result has been the …Read the rest of this entry »