The Challenge of Manufacturing
The traditional manufacturing efficiency formula does not work in today’s supply chain. Measuring labor productivity based on producing large batches of identical items may be efficient but it is not effective. Companies must engage their entire workforce to constantly generate manufacturing process improvement ideas to serve customers faster and manufacturing cost reduction ideas to reduce labor and materials expense.
A second challenge is the proliferation of products. Market demands make it infeasible to offer a single product that can be produced in large quantities. Consumers and companies want products that are customized to their tastes or closely adhere to their requirements. This requires rethinking production methods, inventory systems and product design to achieve mass customization.
How Supply Velocity Helps Manufacturing Clients
Supply Velocity teaches and uses a variety of tools to help improve manufacturing performance.
- Performance Measurement
- Facility layout
- Lean Production Methods: Cellular production, Kanban, quickchangeover, 5S
- Order-to-Delivery Process Streamlining
- Inventory control and optimization
The first step of improving manufacturing performance is to have the right set of balanced measures.
The first step of improving manufacturing performance is to have the right set of balanced measures. Supply Velocity will help you implement a balanced performance scorecard that considers operational efficiency, financial performance, customer success, employee satisfaction and innovation. More importantly we teach you how to turn measures into action, with the entire organization aligned around making improvements.
The key to a productive facility layout is material flow. The ideal layout would receive all components and materials at one end, have work-cells in the middle, surrounded by the parts they use and outbound shipping at the other end. For many practical reasons, this is often not achievable. However, Supply Velocity will use a combination of demand data, time studies, spaghetti diagrams (tracking the movement of people) and process flow mapping to optimize material flow and labor movement in your manufacturing process.
Lean production methods such as flow-cells, Kanban materials management, quickchangeover and 5S visual management are even more important in today’s mass-customized world than when Toyota created them in the 1950s. Supply Velocity uses these tools to help you create a flexible supply chain that provides great customer service while minimizing manufacturing costs.
In addition to making physical improvements, manufacturers must streamline their information flow and business processes. Order-to-Delivery streamlining evaluates the way you process customer orders to ensure the front or back office are not causing bottlenecks for your factory.
If you ask any manufacturing operator or manager the key to efficient and effective production, most will tell you to get them the parts and materials on time. Creating this system requires a combination of forecasting, Kanban materials management and optimizing safety stock to help deal with variation in demand and supplier delivery-time. Supply Velocity uses all of these tools to help you control inventory at optimal levels.
If you are wondering how to improve manufacturing efficiency, Supply Velocity, with hundreds of clients and 600+ Lean and Supply Chain projects, is a proven partner.