Is Lean Manufacturing the answer to your operational woes -II
Previous post - Is LEAN Manufacturing the answer to your operational woes?
A straight forward answer to whether 'Lean manufacturing is the answer to operational efficiency woes' is not feasible, but researchers have acknowledged that along with agility, leanness in operations and manufacturing is important. Most of the ERP and Supply Chain products provide ways and means to inculcate these processes into the e-business architecture.
The most widely used techniques are Kanban system and Just-in-time replenishments. These can easily be inculcated in ERP suites and affect the manufacturing bottom-line significantly. The others are more for process and setup improvements and are generally used by consultants during BPR and process improvements initiatives.
The future direction of products which will make business more efficient from a Lean perspective are the more advanced and integrated Kanban system and the more advanced Just-in-time system. The Kanban system will need to have tighter integration with MRP/planning system so that the future demand predictions (forecasts and firm demands) will help recalculate Kanban bin and buckets sizes. The current breed of ERP products don’t have any Kanban scheduling system which should have been present.
The Just-in-time concept is supported by Postponement theory. This is very much inculcated in the latest supply chain products and ERP but it has a weakness in the scheduling aspect. Sometimes the postponement leads to too much delay due to the lack of last minute scheduling problem. This is a gap which needs to be taken care of.
There are numerous other ways to achieve greater leanness and agility to be more competitive and more efficient.
I encourage fellow bloggers to share some of the tools and techniques they have used.
The future direction of products which will make business more efficient from a Lean perspective are the more advanced and integrated Kanban system and the more advanced Just-in-time system. The Kanban system will need to have tighter integration with MRP/planning system so that the future demand predictions (forecasts and firm demands) will help recalculate Kanban bin and buckets sizes. The current breed of ERP products don’t have any Kanban scheduling system which should have been present.
The Just-in-time concept is supported by Postponement theory. This is very much inculcated in the latest supply chain products and ERP but it has a weakness in the scheduling aspect. Sometimes the postponement leads to too much delay due to the lack of last minute scheduling problem. This is a gap which needs to be taken care of.
There are numerous other ways to achieve greater leanness and agility to be more competitive and more efficient.
I encourage fellow bloggers to share some of the tools and techniques they have used.
Comments
The major ERP packages usually have a development cycle lag when it comes to following new business practices. As such, as you mentioned, even though lean policies have been adopted by business for several years, ERP packages have not provided support for only a few of the lean tools. There are several gaps such major packages can fill to provide broadbase support for lean transactions.
However, some support has been provided by some ERP vendors for lean practices- for example, Oracle provides support for lean operations such as mixed model map, line balancing, line design, takt time, flow routings. It even provides a good tool for flow scheduling, sequencing and execution to support manufacturing multiple products on a balanced line to meet the overall customer demand for the day. Oracle also provides a kanban planning engine to design the operational parameters for kanban-bin size, quantity, etc. based on average daily demand. However, these features have not been widely used since often businesses feel while these are good, their lean requirements are not completely met by this. In such cases, customers can look at using niche products that support their lean tools, or develop custom products that can work along with their ERP to derive maximum benefits out of both ERP and lean. For example, for an industrial customer using Oracle ERP, we developed a custom solution that used the ERP-captured data to enable them to classify their incoming orders into correct value streams - a lean tool that allows them to reduce waste in the shopfloor.
Posted by: Rupam Das | March 20, 2009 6:59 AM