Metal and Industrial Machinery Companies:

Tom runs a successful metals manufacturing business. He’s been with the company for some time, so he knows the ins and outs of the process and the industrial machinery sector they operate in.

Rapid changes in demand make meeting demands difficult and often requires significant effort from supervisors and management to achieve. It would be great to improve customer service (the strike rate), without increasing overhead costs. Even better if he could improve customer service while simultaneously increasing profitability and reducing internal expediting and manual effort.

Tom has been investigating various options, including the improved use of systems to increase customer service or productivity, preferably both.

From reading case studies of successful implementations of advanced planning and scheduling solutions, looking at webinars, etc., he notes that users claim achieved benefits such as increased customer service, productivity improvements of 10 – 30% and ROI of weeks to a few months. While many case studies and webinars are not from the industrial machinery industry, he can see how these solutions will also work in the metals and industrial machinery industries and specifically in his factory. Tom notes with interest that many of these implementations all discuss replacing Excel based solutions.

Using the current solutions set is clearly delivering the current reality. At best tweaking the current solution set will deliver small increases.

Improved Visibility

One of the aspects that Tom particularly likes about the advanced planning and scheduling solutions offering, is the way they display data.

He finds that the use of the Gantt display allows him to instantly understand factors such as load on a department, production orders at risk of not being completed on time, product mix planned for production, today’s predicted strike rate and future production orders where shortages exist.

The ability to instantaneously change the colour pallet to reflect different attributes makes it very easy to quickly understand the days load, mix and potential problems.

Using business intelligence (BI) tools will help Tom better understand the schedule at a consolidated level. Being able to quickly see the order mix by customer, product family and so on will give him a much clearer understanding of the challenges they face before they occur and not, as so often happens now, after the event. Tom muses that pictures are clearly more useful than 1000’s of lines from reports.

Tom is going to make sure that when he walks through the factory that he always starts with the Planning office, to review and discuss the planned schedule, potential problems and proposed solutions. Doing this will ensure that he brings his knowledge, experience and decision-making responsibility to bear on the most critical issues. It will also give him a background to things he sees on the production floor.

Improved Decision Making

Tom can see how automation of the scheduling tasks and resulting scheduling speed, will enable them to quickly evaluate alternative action plans.

Being able to quickly evaluate alternative plans and then selecting one to run with, will give a greater sense of control than the current method, where they use experience and gut feel to make a call today. Tom can think of numerous incidences where they decided on a course of action, only to find out that some element wasn’t considered, subsequently making the decision a bad call.

Tom muses that it would be nice to be proactive concerning problems and decisions vs. the current mode of largely being reactive and firefighting.

The claim made in the case studies that the planning effort will be reduced by +/-80% seems exaggerated but may be possible.

Tom can see that they will have to improve the data accuracy in the system and the feedback speed. Without making these changes they will constantly need to 2nd guess the system as they take into account conditions known but not reflected. They will have to do whatever is necessary to reach a point where they trust the data in the system, enough to make decisions they are happy to defend.

Improved Coordination

Tom knows that looking at a projected schedule or choosing from alternative schedules, still requires that all parties be informed of the chosen production sequences, as quickly as possible, so that they can complete their actions to achieve the desired or intended outcome.

Tom visualizes a team of synchronised swimmers; even if the water they perform in seems a little more viscous than desired.

Tom knows that the advanced planning and scheduling solutions can produce the necessary reports, by department, that will be required. He will need to ensure that supervisors work to the lists provided. In certain cases, online views of the schedule will make it easier to keep them updated with sequence changes, especially where they are chasing late deliveries needed to meet demand in full. The availability of accurate schedules will enable the supervisor in the dispatch department to better co-ordinate deliveries to customers.

He can see the buying department being able to better manage the call in, or delay, of raw materials and components to meet projected schedules over the next few days.

Tom realizes that while there is much to think about, he can see how the improved inter and intra departmental co-ordination will drive significant productivity improvements.

Reducing Risks

Tom understands that he is going to create some stress internally in order to drive the changes that he requires. He will need to work carefully with key staff to reassure them that their knowledge and skills are valued within the company, even while the rules they work to are extracted and captured into the new system.

Doing this will reduce the risk that the company faces when Gordon retires, or Dorothy is promoted.

In addition to trapping knowledge, if the system can give early warning on stocks that might expire and take this into account during planning, they should be able to reduce scrap costs associated with expired stocks considerably.

Tracking Production

Tom sees how the faster and smarter scheduling will lead to increased customer service and increased productivity. How trapping knowledge will reduce organizational risk associated with the unexpected loss of employees.

He recognizes that some thought will need to be given to improving data integrity, both of the static and dynamic kind.

The static part should not be a problem. As for safety reasons, the factory keeps records of recipes and these are computerized. They will need to make sure that the planning and scheduling solutions can access these.

The area that Tom feels he will need to give some thought to is the tracking of actual activities, as they occur, so that the current status of activities is available to the schedule and to supervisors and managers needing the information.

Tom can see that implementing a tracking system simultaneously will not only make data available to appropriate users, but it will automate their offline data capture process, provide history in case of a recall, help the plant to analyze actual behavior vs. planned behavior and they can use it to capture and manage quality issues.

Tom recognizes that the tracking and scheduling solutions need to be implemented simultaneously to achieve maximum benefit. He has formed a clear picture in his mind how he will achieve significant improvements in productivity and hence profitability, while simultaneously improving customer service.

Get in touch with me if you need any more reason to use an advanced scheduling tool. I’ll be happy to assist in setting up the appropriate system for your requirements.