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…)

As manufacturers, we are always looking for ways to make things run faster, cheaper, and simpler. Often, the approach we take involves reassessing the production elements within the plant that impede the system flow.

In such an analysis we take stock in the operation as a whole in search for efficiencies in the parts. In short, to enhance productivity while responding quickly to rapidly changing customer demands, we try to take full advantage of the resources available to our plant.

In doing so, the modern manufacturer strives for total enterprise resource planning (ERP) that ensures all plant elements are in synch with each other. In the evolution of ERP as a manufacturing concept, the idea of work center management has come to the forefront as a place of greatest gains in efficiency.

While pull-production techniques certainly strive for just-in-time (JIT) manufacturing modes, efficiencies that might be gained in (more…)

Since the introduction of the lean system of continuous improvement manufacturing (CI), the desire has always been for inventory management that minimizes stock on hand, if not fully eliminating it.

True to lean principals, by eliminating waste at every turn in the manufacturing process quality is improved while production time and costs are reduced. As one of the “seven wastes” in lean philosophy, inventory proves to be inefficient when a plant maintains more on-hand inventory than is minimally required to produce products in the immediate time frame.

Rather than the batched, push-production system where large inventories are maintained for the potential of future sales or supply chain problems, lean methods employ (more…)

In today’s increasingly competitive manufacturing environment, where tightened margins mean tightened grips on waste, running lean inventories is the name of the production game. Materials management is now the art of balancing production scheduling with inventory acquisition—tasks often performed by personnel with varying degrees of responsibility.

In large industrial organizations, the specialization of materials management has resulted in distinctions often drawn between the work of a buyer or purchasing agent and that of a purchasing manager.

While purchasing agents commonly focus on routine purchasing tasks, purchasing managers usually (more…)