Manufacturing
Successful manufacturing and order fulfilment businesses will not just embrace change but anticipate and drive it too.
For some time we have been seeing a growing trend in the industry towards a demand orientated IT infrastructure. Not only does the downturn in the economy force manufacturers to consider consolidation measures (the cost savings achieved by standardising systems throughout the business) but also upgrading to more powerful and truly integrated software – e.g. databases, accounts and CRM.
Consolidation not only saves resources, but helps achieve simplicity of information management across the entire business. By standardising and linking the separate ordering, stock control, communications, logistics and financial processes a more efficient operation is born. Less duplication of effort, less form-filling, more transactional throughput and a centralised database and accounts system help to enhance employee productivity and reduce the administrational burden that prevents a company from moving forward.
Pull Scheduling – Database Driven by Save9
When customer demand is first established in the form of confirmed order, the organisation begins production by sending signals (via Save9 software) in a ‘backward’ direction. All the preceding processes send signals to the ongoing processes. These signals come in the form of an “electronic card” called Kanban. Kanban is a Japanese word meaning signboard.
Kanban is a reverse production order signal that guides every preceding manufacturing or fulfilment process to produce what is needed, in necessary quantity and at necessary time for the next process. Kanban works not only within different production departments of a manufacturing assembly plant, but also between its vendors supplying parts to it. Here is a diagram that shows how it works in an assembling process.
Two kinds of Kanban (the production instruction Kanban and the parts retrieval Kanban) are used for either managing parts for an assembly line or for order fulfilment:
The gains can be immediate and quite dramatic. The impact on customer satisfaction through rapid order fulfilment, increased employee morale, improved staff retention, lower running costs and the company’s ability to take on more work in the economic upturn is very welcome for manufacturers looking for growth or diversification beyond 2009.
Think Lean
Everyone wants to be Lean these days, whether it’s when stepping off a scale in the morning or when reviewing the cost of running a successful business. Lean IT is a business and technology imperative for increasing value and reducing waste in the delivery of business processes and systems. But how can you become Lean in a myriad of existing complex system portfolios, processes and sourcing models?
The truth is, you must embrace Lean from three perspectives — people, process and technology — and put everything in the context of your business and systems environment. Lean is a way of thinking and working that enables application development and delivery professionals, business process experts and information and knowledge managers to work closely with the business to more rapidly assemble solutions that deliver, just in time, the needed capabilities, information and insights. It’s the right way to deliver Agile, fit-to-purpose, efficient solutions and it’s a big change from how the business and IT typically work together today.
Today’s reality is forcing these issues:
- Business innovation is hard to enable. To survive is to innovate, but building environments that foster innovation requires radical changes to traditional business and engineering structures — moving from traditional approaches that focus on efficiency and throughput to ones that encourage collaboration and partnership.
- Bloatware reigns. Whether it’s excessive weight and complexity in applications, processes, or information management, the bloated solutions that we use today often hinder business results. Most enterprises suffer from overweight application and information infrastructure and overly complex processes that are hard to change and only loosely linked to today’s top business concerns.
- Fit-to-purpose is the new mantra. Becoming Lean is the antidote to the bloatware problem, but Lean is more than a software development or process improvement methodology. The trend toward Lean has been building for years, but a global recession has accelerated that momentum.
By embracing Lean IT from Save9, you’ll be well-positioned to tap into technology solutions that propel the business forward as the economy rebounds. In fact, embracing Lean is a critical imperative for helping your organisation move toward business technology — where business and IT work seamlessly together to drive the business to new levels of competitiveness. Whether you’re focused on Lean/Agile business process management, sustainability, just-in-time information, collaboration and Social Computing, the use of lighter-weight programming models and runtime environments, innovative uses of open source or SaaS, or Agile development, you need to be prepared.
Lean thinking and Lean practices must affect the choices you make as a business technology leader, helping you to determine the best tools for your people, and helping implement Agile processes streamlined to best run your business. Save9 will help you weather today’s economic storm more effectively and, more importantly, be positioned for success as the economy turns around.