It’s impossible to leave a customer alone.  They’re either yours, or they’re somebody else’s.  In fact, in the course of doing business, the constant struggle is for the acquisition and maintenance of as many good quality customers as you can get-those that fit your prescribed profile of what it takes for them to need you in terms of product or service. 

This needs-based connection between vendor and customer is what in business we’ve come to know as the “relationship”, and it is at the heart of customer relationship management software systems, otherwise known as CRM. 

There are many approaches to CRM, but ultimately when a company talks about the process they’re almost always referring to sales force automation or (more…)

If you’re still using paper in the front office and on the shop floor (routers, schematics, timeclock, etc.), then you probably have some room for efficiency improvements. In fact, there are many manufacturers whose business practices and information systems are still built around the idea of moving paper documents though the course of their production processes. Paperwork is both a fragile and relatively bulky medium, and inevitably the slow moving information it contains will either be archived in space-consuming files or lost through extensive and often careless shop floor handling.

To counter these negative tendencies, manufacturing technology has advanced paper reduction techniques through digital mediums and storage. With digital media, massive amounts of information can be stored in one very small, very central location for immediate and simultaneous withdrawal of real-time data.

To be sure, some manufacturing operations are still comfortable functioning with paper. The reengineering of business practices is never an easy thing to do, and often the maintaining of a successful status quo seems to be the easiest thing to do. However, as more and more companies see the value of waste reduction in lean approaches to manufacturing, supply chain management, shortened lead times, and global competition all mean that (more…)

What is cycle time to you? A process that your inventory manager makes happen on occasion? Some arbitrary notion of a period between output from workcenter to workcenter? A concept only loosely connected to scheduling, performance, and supplier relations? If your idea of cycle time is that of a business procedure that’s only marginally important when compared to the myriad other tasks involved in manufacturing—then, you may want to rethink that thought.

Vital to positive bottomlines, cycle time reduction also reduces costs, lowers inventory levels, improves production scheduling and throughput predictability, improves customer satisfaction, and can even result in a better quality product. Indeed, if there were one operational issue you had to focus on to improve overall profits, in a world concerned with speed of manufacture that issue would be (more…)

In the age of an electronically connected global economy, where capital travels from nation to nation at the speed of light, swimming afloat in the supply stream is not always easy. It really doesn’t matter what sort of business your in, globalization of the supply chain means that if you’re not ready and in it, your business is simply and quickly passed by for one that is. Manufacturers, wholesalers, distributors, retailers—there’s no discrimination when it comes to the instant gratification of the consumer demand. With the maturity of enterprise resource planning software (ERP), the expectations are for vendors to operate lean in order to respond rapidly and with a cost-effective value.

It is certainly true that, because of ever-tightening margins, wasteful production practices are no longer tolerated. Instead, producers and providers are expected to run lean, a process of streamlining production and distribution to reduce and eliminate waste or non-value activities to the process. In a broader sense, one could extrapolate this philosophy out to the larger supply chain as well as focus it into the movement of products within the supply chain. In other words, connectivity also means that the stream of supply must flow with as few impediments as possible. At the same time, any processes that stop supply chain flow must be steady and unceasing, and processes that use inventory should always (more…)