The process industry (food & beverage, liquids, sheet goods, solid & fluid packaging operations) differs from the parts manufacturing and assembly industry, where the Lean, 6 Sigma and Theory of Constraints methodologies were developed. The unique characteristics of supply chains in the process industry make them less responsive to a one-size-fits-all approach. Performance optimisation in … Read more
Process factories (food & beverage, liquids, sheet goods, solid & fluid packaging operations) must satisfy the competing needs of high volumes, high variety and high variability. All of this in a capital intensive environment where throughput is limited by equipment rather than labour and where product changeover issues are very complex. Process factory design is … Read more
What does your customer value? The harsh reality is that customers often don’t care if your plant is state-of-the-art. They generally don’t care if your warehousing and transportation network is cutting edge.
Usually, what they care about is how quickly products move to and through their supermarket or factory, whether the product is to specification
Lean manufacturing was developed using the Toyota Production System. Hence it is instructive for those working in the food & beverage industry to examine how food & beverage manufacturing is different when compared to car manufacturing. We have come up with 7 fundamental differences and would love to hear from you if you can think … Read more
You know the signs, the factory keeps missing production schedules and you keep depleting finished goods inventory. Its now so bad that you are missing vital customer orders and some customers are threatening to delist. This is a common story and here we use a scenario based on actual events to illustrate how an understanding … Read more
Taiichi Ohno is the long accepted Japanese initiator of the western version of the Toyota Production System called Lean. There is growing recognition that his initial ideas, while powerful in an isolated context, were only a portion of his systemic view of a complex supply chain. In any case, history can now chronicle the rise … Read more
This is a tough question and if someone can provide a commonsense answer then they must know what they are talking about. Well here we go! To be relevant the calculation for an optimum order quantity should take account of 100 years of industrial engineering and operations research. So ….. below we review the 4 … Read more
Production variability and demand variability causes congestion in supply chains. One way to reduce this congestion is to reduce the variability by addressing its causes. Another and more subtle way to deal with congestion is by combining multiple sources of variability. This is known as variability pooling, and has a number of supply chain applications. … Read more
You have been tasked with the job of identifying options for purchasing products from 3rd party manufacturers. You have completed the comparisons on the basis of total supply chain costs and as a consequence of this you have decided on a supplier. This article uses an example to demonstrate how involving the production department can … Read more
Activity Based Costing (ABC) has replaced older methods of cost accounting. Overheads are apportioned to products on the basis of how much of the overhead activities are actually required by the product. However, when comparing options for operational change we use Contribution Margin or Octane rather than Unit Cost (whether unit costs are derived from … Read more
