Instant Manufacturing: Shrink Your Production Time and Do It NOW!
The speed of delivery sets up a powerful advantage in manufacturing
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Instant Manufacturing: Shrink Your Production Time and Do It NOW!
- The speed of delivery sets up a powerful advantage in manufacturing
By Andrei Kossyrine
© Xpress Software Inc. - All Rights reserved
http://www.xssoftware.com
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Making manufacturing more profitable is not a "one size fits all" solution. This change in thinking and operations is also not accomplished in a single step or procedure change. The following is one of a series of topics designed to enhance the profitability of manufacturing in general.
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The speed of delivery sets up a powerful advantage in manufacturing. To provide your clients with faster delivery, delays need to be eliminated - that time between order entry, production planning, manufacturing, assembly and shipping. That's a lot of "delay" time in the current typical process even when your operation is running smoothly.
Your offshore competition takes only 1.5 to two months on average to manufacture and ship their products to the United States. You should take half that time to do the same. Let's look more closely at how to slash your "delay" times.
One of our clients, the manufacturing wing of Global Office Furniture Corporation (www.globaltotaloffice.com), has dropped to five business days for delivery from a 14-day lead time. And office furniture is in an industry known for its three to six week delivery promises.
Global Office Furniture successfully implemented the following strategies:
1) Cut down on order processing time - from the moment you receive the order to the moment the product is available and scheduled for production.
2) Automate as much of pre-manufacturing as possible. Generation of all necessary manufacturing documents: bills of materials, assembly instructions, routing sheets, product and part drawings, production reports, etc., has to be done automatically within minutes.
3) Make and load all CNC programs automatically. Use data from your order entry and scheduling systems to make all CNC programs on the fly for all your equipment. Load them automatically by scanning bar-coded documents or labels in real time. (All of your machines are CNC enabled, right? If not - upgrade! It is not 19th century anymore.) Put those CNC programs into the network CNC library so all your equipment will have a real time access at any time.
4) Use bar-coding everywhere throughout the plant. Make a good use of barcodes on product/part labels and on manufacturing documents.
Bar-coding, for example, can:
automatically load all CNC programs from the network. Your system should automatically load all the necessary commands into your machines if the engineers already have created relevant CNC programs and your bar-coding scanner identifies the machines that the scanned products go to.
Your old CNC equipment that cannot be networked? Don't worry, there's an inexpensive solution. Put a separate barcode station next to your CNC machine, scan the barcode at this station, let the system load CNC program automatically to a floppy disk and then take that disk and easily transfer it to the CNC machine without any more manipulations. Voila! You've got your program!
track manufacturing status for all the parts, products, orders and shipments that go through your shop floor. Scanning the barcode at each job or work center stores all the information in a central database. Shift supervisors can monitor production progress in real time. More importantly, customer service representatives can access the same data in real time to provide customers with an up-to-date order status.
Eventually you should have a secure web-based order status inquiry system so your clients check on their products' status without having to call you.
track defects and reorder defective parts instantly. Do not wait until the end of the day to count all the defective products and parts. If your system allows defects to be verified and reordered instantly - use it. This saves you as much as a day in lead time.
5) Ship the product when it's ready. Do not store it. Do not put it on your inventory shelves. Ship it ASAP. If "soon" isn't soon enough, find another way and ship it. The faster you send it out, the sooner you collect your money.
6) Receive all of your orders electronically. Ask your customers to send all new orders electronically in whatever format they can (EDI, XML, text, email, etc). Offer an incentive by promising them the opportunity to check on their orders' status in real time through the Internet.
7) Manage all orders by exception. Have your people look at the order ONLY if there is a problem or discrepancy. Otherwise, your system should automatically check and process all the details - prices, product codes, colors and options, etc. This way can process at least 80 percent of all orders without any human intervention, all within a split second.
8) Execute rule-based scheduling. Do not let your orders waiting to be scheduled. Let your scheduling software do its job and only adjust when necessary.
To boost your profit margins, use as many of these ideas as you can.
In most cases the only difference between you and your competition is the speed of delivery. And in today's instant society if you deliver your products in half the time you take now - your business will skyrocket!
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Since 1996 Xpress Software Inc. has provided
technical assistance in lean manufacturing methods,
computer systems and business process automation
to maximize manufacturing profits.
Visit its website www.xssoftware.com or contact
Andrei Kossyrine at andrei@xssoftware.com.
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