Reduce inventory by 62.8%

July 29, 2013

Installing Asprova

An auto parts manufacturer,  after discovering how Asprova has been helping a lot of companies make their manufacturing lean, installed it in their mainframe to improve their own processes. Their three main reasons for doing so were:

  • Sharing and general purpose capabilities
  • High-speed scheduling
  • Full scheduling logic

autopartsThese reasons further proved the credibility and reliability of the scheduler even more. Truth to be told, Asprova is widely-used all throughout world renowned companies in  Japan (52.4% market share dominance) and abroad, and is actively used in a wide range of manufacturing areas. Asprova also gives its users a friendly graphical user interface that allows them the ease needed to speed up scheduling processes. Lastly, minimization of set-up times has always been a normal achievement with Asprova, and has been vastly used to eliminate the causes of wastes.

Reaping the Rewards

Objectively speaking, the company experienced the following benefits:

  1. setup time reduction of production planning – they can now prepare detailed plans in time units that pay attention to loads
  2. effectively reduced finished product inventories to 62.8 percent
  3. and, they were able to control progress in real time.

These are just a few of the many merits that can be achieved with Asprova.

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Lead time reduction: what are its effects?

July 23, 2013

Reducing Lead Time

Lead time reduction, was previously discussed in the article Lead Time Reduction and the Limits of MRP published under the umbrella of Production Scheduling Lessons in this site. It is generally known as reducing the latency (or delay) between the initiation and execution of a process. This is a very important feat in production.

A world renowned manufacturer, who launched the first facsimiles for office use,  that was in the expanding phase in their sales, experienced an increase in the high- mix and low-volume production. As demand increases, the need for production processes goes up along with it. The company needed to increase their machines and make production more efficient. They needed a production scheduler to make the processes smoother, and they called for Asprova.

To be more efficient in production, they needed to reduce lead time. If a company needs to reduce inventory, it would be better if they would rather reduce lead time than directly reducing inventory itself. Asprova gave them just the help they needed.

After implementation of this production scheduler, they were able to witness a great reduction in lead time—it was actually cut in half. WIP (Work-in-process) inventory was also reduced by 50%. They improved the efficiency of the whole production process. They even experienced a reduction in delivery delay.

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Would the PDCA cycle become faster when accuracy improves?

July 18, 2013

Make-to-Stock

Vibration-proofing products are the specialty of this Make-to-Stock (MTS) manufacturer that we will try to analyze in this article. There are two reasons why they installed Asprova mainly: to improve efficiency and to upgrade accuracy.

The Production schedule, before Asprova introduction, was made three times a month. Because the company needed a lot of help with their vulcanization processes, they wanted to focus on narrowing this out for it to be automatically scheduled. Scheduling only three times a month made it hard for them to do so. But, after Asprova installation, they were able to schedule every day and made the processes more efficient and accurate. After this event, the company plans to expand the use of Asprova in other aspects of their production processes.

Production Planning Enhanced

According to their managers, the improvement of efficiency in making production plans is one of the best effects after Asprova introduction. Another is the accuracy enhancement of production plans.

The use of Asprova does not end in just the aforementioned details. The company predicts that in the future, there will still be effects like great reduction in-progress inventories.

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What are the Benefits of Synchronizing Sales Production Orders?

July 9, 2013

Manual Scheduling

We’re now going to focus on an international company which does Make-To-Stock (MTS) manufacturing. This company is known for supplying disks to aircraft engines. Like other companies, this one had problems in scheduling because of their manual approach. This often caused delay in production operations. They also had to respond to frequent order changes.

The company needed a high-speed production scheduling tool that can function well in a fast-paced production environment—and also promise results. They tried a lot of schedulers to solve this issue before, but among all the production schedulers they tried, there was  one who could perform better than others.

It was Asprova.

Synchronizing Sales and Production Orders

According to the manager of this company’s production department, they chose this production scheduling software because it has large parameters that can be assigned by the user. “There are particular conditions and requirements here that are unique to us. Asprova’s flexibility fills the bill in that regard,” he adds.

The software helped the company synchronize their sales orders as well as their production orders. With Asprova, they were able to attain a uniform production planning and created precise production plans. Another noticeable achievement after the installation of Asprova is the automation of the previously manual scheduling operations.

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What is the Importance of Scheduling in MTO Manufacturing?

July 8, 2013

MTO Manufacturing

GammaIn the case of a Mexico-based Make-to-Order (MTO) company, production only starts when the order is received. Each customer order is unique, requiring the really intense coordination of every single activity, from paper purchase to artwork and plate preparation to machine make-readies. There are many restrictions and variants in MTO. Also, there’s the problem of how to deal with shortening lead time.

Without a very flexible and capable tool for scheduling, the operators, in this MTO Company, will only be processing orders chaotically, especially on times when there are tons of orders. Sometimes, the operators might be forced to refuse some orders and would be unsure of the delivery time. This will also prove to be a hassle if the customer cancels the order. This company experienced these ordeals before they met Asprova.

After implementing Asprova, positive changes become apparent. According to case study 12 of Asprova, overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) in the company increased by 80% after using the scheduling tool for a while.

There were other benefits like the late delivery which was reduced by 50% and WIP (work-in-progress) which was cut by 66%, but more importantly, the company was able to utilize their assets better, all thanks to Asprova.

 

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Production Scheduling Software: In-house VS Standard Packaged

July 4, 2013

Quick Response

Consumers look for certain traits in their service and/or product providers. Two of the many things that customers assess in manufacturers are these: a swift product delivery and a fast response to their orders or order changes. These have been continuing to stand as a firm production standard and have also taught as a management concept known to many as Quick Response (QR).

QR is a management concept created to increase consumer satisfaction and survive increasing competition from new competitors. It intends to shorten the lead time from receiving an order to delivery of the products and increase the cash flow.

Asprova, the product that aims to apply the QR concept on its clients has certainly proven itself to a well known international company that produces heavy electric machinery systems, industrial mecha-tronics, information and telecommunications systems, electronic devices, manufacturing and sales of home electric appliances, and more.

Production Scheduling

According to the company, even though they have developed their own in-house scheduler, it required a great deal of troublesome work in establishing a system. Scheduling took a long time when it is applied to actual use. In order to solve such problems, they considered the introduction of the packaged solution—Asprova.

The previous in-house made scheduling software is very simple but it was also very slow. When the company switched to Asprova, they experienced a shift from the 5-10 minutes scheduling to a 2 second scheduling. The scheduling implementation was reduced by 80% and drastically shortened the implementation overhead.

Also, one of the most notable improvements, the company said, is the fact that it enabled them to respond quickly and accurately to customer orders.

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Why is Planning Efficiency so Important?

July 1, 2013

Flawless Production Planning

“A goal without a plan is just a wish” says Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, a renowned French author of Philosophy books. The same can be said in modern manufacturing.

Planning is one of the most crucial stages in the processes of production. Without a detailed plan, goals cannot be met with ease. Even so, no matter how important planning is, it must be—like most things in life—fast and, as much as possible, flawless. No company who’s in their right minds would wish to unnecessarily lengthen this phase of production. Rather, we daresay that all manufacturers wish that the planning stages in their production processes would, as much as possible,  be shortened without the risk of errors, apparently.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Efficiency in planning is without a doubt, an attainable goal. This has been the fervent desire of one of the leading international camera film producers at some point. As we have discussed in previous studies, deficiencies in planning results in too many unwanted miscalculations and slip-ups in production.

Low cost, High-Speed Production Scheduler

This company has experienced these, and decided to switch to Asprova as well, and the reason was “In order to cope with rapidly changing business environments around that time, the manufacturing process for camera films required an improvement in efficiency in preparing plans. Given these circumstances, we considered utilizing Asprova as it was not only already in place for our other products but also didn’t require a high introduction cost” says a Logistic System Department Officer of the company. It did not only help with planning itself, but also gave the company a very cost-efficient deal.

According to the data found in Case Study 10 of Asprova, this company cited the following as highly rated effects after using Asprova:

  • Promotion of visualization
  • Keeping delivery dates
  • Reducing inventory
  • Improving operational ratio
  • Reducing lead-time
  • Improving throughput
  • Reducing planning cycle
  • Handling frequent planning changes
  • And, consolidation of  valuable human know-how into system resources.

But out of all this goodness, their most notable experience would be that the planning period was shortened by more than 20%, and saved a lot of money by reducing the planning staff by 50%.

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Shortening Lead Time with Speed and Accuracy

June 26, 2013

Electronics Manufacturers’ Dilemma

Speed and Accuracy do not always go together. It is for a fact that, these two things would try to get in each other’s way, especially in manufacturing of electronic products. The reason for this is the detail-oriented specifications that are needed to be considered in most devices. Sometimes, by striving to go too fast in production might result in wastes if some important details were overlooked.

Let’s look at the case of a world renowned Japanese manufacturing company which have been producing wide variety of electronic products since 1987. The company was trying their best to meet customer demands. They simply wanted to upgrade their systems to achieve both scheduling speed and accuracy and possibly, they wanted to improve on the following areas: shortening of lead time,  improving productivity of their every employee, and shortening the operational time in preparing planning.

To accomplish this task, they searched for a scheduling package that can do all this and more. After a while, they found the scheduling software, Asprova, that offers a solution on all these areas and gives them a lot more than just that. Asprova has been known as having the uncanny ability of resolving companies’ scheduling nightmares and if its potentials will be utilized a hundred percent, then you will be able to improve upon not only in the areas mentioned above, but also on other important matters in scheduling – and most importantly, increase your company’s bottom line.

Improvements

In conclusion, the aforementioned company who was searching for a decent upgrade in their processes achieved what they were searching for after implementing the use of Asprova. According to Case study 9 of Asprova, lead time was shortened by 20%, the unevenness of lead time was reduced by 30%, production productivity per person was enhanced by 43%, and operational time in preparing planning was chopped by 16.7%. These are definite results highly improving in terms of speed and accuracy. And lastly, these are not the only things that their company improved upon.

The installation and implementation of Asprova has been seen by this company as the harbinger of productive and profitable times ahead of them. We urge you to experience high-speed and accurate scheduling with the help of Asprova.

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Two Factories, One Production Engineer – Made Possible by High-Speed Production Scheduler

June 24, 2013

Custom Made Production Schedule

To keep up with the fast-paced manufacturing industry, one must learn to innovate. You will hear these words constantly if you would venture into production businesses. Time is one of the most essential factors in producing and meeting the ever-increasing and changing demands of the masses and the orders of other companies as well. Nevertheless, producers have to keep in mind that upgrading more often leads to positive results. Let’s look at the case of a synthetic resin manufacturer that had several problems that is concerned with time.

Using their own custom made scheduler, which had AI capabilities, the company was doing well—or so they thought. Their scheduling was based on order prospect and inventory information calculation. However, their custom made scheduler had tons of restrictions – one of which was the lengthy process of coming up with a schedule. It took them too long to process orders and other necessary things for production. In addition to that, their old hardware caused them machine failures that led to heavy burden on scheduling managers and unavoidable overtime work twice a month just for the routine scheduling job. This is quite miserable for the laborers. Relying on machines that don’t give good results is absurd.

Switching to Asprova

After realizing that they would need to upgrade their system, the company thought of numerous ways to improve. Fast enough, they discovered Asprova. They chose Asprova as their replacement scheduler because they were impressed with the scheduling speed, the ease that they’ve seen in its modification features and rescheduling features, and lastly, in issues operationally. Asprova allowed the users to easily modify schedules on its Gantt chart visually and effectively.

The most important factor here, once again, is undeniably time. Speeding up the processes of their factories is their first priority. When they incorporated Asprova into their scheduling routines, they amassed great developments. Visualization of production schedules provided by the Gantt chart transformed rescheduling time to 5 seconds from the past where it took 4 to 5 days.

Do you feel that your factories’ processes could be improved? Are you still grappling with unnecessary long hours (and additional costs from overtime work) just to make production schedules? Do you put heavy burdens on your schedulers by giving too much workloads – and deprive them of much needed rest just to meet customer demands? Don’t fret.

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Visualization of Production Schedule Gets the Job Done more Efficiently

June 18, 2013

Visualization of Production Schedule

Visualization has been one of the most important part of production as this will allow you to take quick action should there be any unexpected  problems. For example, a sudden huge, rush order. It is apparent  that visualization leads to the maximization of the potentials of the production processes. Let’s try to crack the nutshell in the next paragraphs using a clear and concise example.

A well-known dye manufacturing company lacked visualization in the scheduling data of their factory, and this resulted to heavy dependence on human schedulers for order processing. As we have discussed in previous case studies, depending solely on schedule managers and/or human schedulers gives you headaches of all sorts. In this company’s case, it lead to work overload for their schedule managers because attending to changes and inquiries during daytime, and drafting the appropriate schedule at night became their routine. Because of this, they were unable to comply with the required efficiency to meet customer satisfaction. It was quite obvious that they needed a better scheduling scheme that would lessen the pressure on their laborers.

Getting tired of this long, inadequate routine, the company looked for solutions. At first, they tried to collaborate with a software company to produce their own production scheduling system. However, it didn’t work because of many setbacks. After that event, Asprova was recommended to them by an authorized distributor. The company agreed to try the product through the demonstration, and was impressed because of the following: Asprova’s scheduling speed, the Graphical User Interface (visualization), and the cost-effectiveness in terms of its version upgrades. The company, later on, decided to apply the Asprova scheduling software and just from one of its many features, the company was freed from their paralyzed state that lack of visualization held them in.

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