With all the hurdles placed before manufacturers today to compete in the global economy (governmental, competitive, environmental, etc.), the last thing a company needs is to do the sort of actions on its own that work against the operation.

Yet, this happens everyday when excess or obsolete inventory write-offs occur. These costly supply-chain problems result in the unnecessary fraying of bottom-line profits due to wasted materials, wasted time, and wasted opportunities to move parts/products out of the shop before they reach the end of their usefulness for a customer.

However, the cause for these manufacturing inefficiencies is quite common from shop to shop: Poor demand-management practices lead to poor inventory management. All too often, (more…)

Of all the factors that influence a customer’s desire to remain loyal to a manufacturer or job shop, the greatest of all is, perhaps, consistent on-time delivery of their orders. Throughout the supply chain, on-time delivery is vital to the continuation of the manufacturing effort—should one domino in the system go down, the rest are sure to follow in suit.

However, today it is not enough to merely know you are on-time, but it is also important to know just how much you are on-time. Indeed, supplier performance has never been more (more…)

Without a doubt, for manufacturers the biggest payback from computer and software investments is in the area of performance measurement. Such metrics allow management the ability to be flexible, to make better decisions about what will make an enterprise operate at the greatest level of efficiency.

Upfront efforts in the elimination of waste in all operations of the plant—from administration to shipping—results in greater sales levels, lower overall costs of operation, and shortened cycle times for inventory. Perhaps the greatest benefit of all from performance measurement is found in the maximization of human resources; that is, by adhering as closely as possible to standard costs for production.

As a tool for providing labor performance measures for manufacturers and job shops, (more…)

Synchronicity. It is something every organization hopes to achieve, but more often than not falls a bit short of attaining. When we talk about synchronicity we are speaking of principles of connection, where the parts work in total alliance with the whole.

Historically, synchronicity has been of particular importance in manufacturing where the quest is always for a seamless connectivity between product planning, product development, material sourcing, and shop management. Indeed, synchronicity in manufacturing is a direct result of the knowledge (data) that any one part of the system has about the whole facility at any one moment.

To achieve synchronicity in manufacturing, enterprise resource planning systems (ERPs) have been developed to integrate all data of an organization into a unified system. Typically, ERP systems use multiple components of computer software and hardware to achieve the desired integration of a manufacturing system. A primary part of most ERP systems is the use of a real-time, connected database structure to store information for use by the various system modules. (more…)