What We Do
We work with manufacturing plants to help them consistently meet customer commitments without last minute surprises and unexpected extra effort and cost. We do this by preventing slippage — slippage is any break in the plan that disrupts both normal material flow and the rhythm of the plant that is preventable by timely key user intervention.
Plan the Work and Work the Plan
Users spend too much time digging out data and too little time analyzing it. Their time is spent manually working the plan, which is all of those behind-the-scenes activities that planners, schedulers, buyers and production supervisors do manually and informally to ensure resources are correctly coordinated and deployed to meet current commitments, to make the plan happen. Consider what knowledge workers go through to determine whether commitments will be met. They wade through large volumes of data and are constantly searching through screens, adding numbers on calculators, making phone calls, shuffling through large reports and making multi-colored highlights attempting to work the plan and make it happen. And they do this all day, every day. They can actually become unrecognized production constraints.
Power saws don’t make bad carpenters into good carpenters, power saws make fast, bad carpenters. Power saws make good carpenters more productive by reducing the non-value-added steps of sawing so more time can be spent on value-added tasks such as measuring. Our demand-driven methodology allows key users to focus on the activities that are most likely to cause a delay in meeting customer commitments. This improves the effectiveness of planners, buyers, schedulers and supervisors by automating the time-consuming and non-productive manual “data chasing” and provides them with more time for analysis, decision-making, coordination and communication to apply their knowledge; in short, better tools to work the plan.
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