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
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
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 effects is by combining multiple sources of variability. This is known as variability pooling, and has a number of manufacturing and … Read more
Capacity decisions made at the time of asset procurement have a huge strategic effect on the long term competitiveness of a manufacturing operation. This is particularly true in the process industry where most of the factories use Flow Lines.
In this article we explain how flow lines are designed as well as the supply chain system benefits of un-balancing flow lines, i.e. adding extra capacity upstream and downstream of a flow line’s bottleneck.
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
Maintenance management can be something of a thankless job, not helped by the differences in how people define maintenance and reliability. In most cases the reliability of a factory is delegated to the maintenance manager however few can articulate the difference between reliability and maintenance. Even fewer can define the difference between normal maintenance and … Read more