Quality requirements and competitive sales prices are set by the market and must of course be met. Today's production company can differentiate itself from the competition through its ability to deliver at short notice and high delivery reliability. The degree of delivery reliability is an important evaluation criterion from the customer's point of view. The following points are the main causes for delivery problems.
Production planning is the "brain" and "backbone" of a production company. All departments and groups work to complete their activities just in time according to the plan. If production planning is not realistic from the outset, delivery problems are inevitable. This is typical of a deficient planning system:
In most cases, the main reason for the lack of process synchronization is that the planning tool is unable to create a sequence plan. No sequence planning means that each department, each group, each resource decides its own order priority and production sequence. The consequences are:
Without realistic and feasible planning no reasonable production control is possible. Instead, the main task for process control becomes a fire-fighting task. An optimal production control includes:
The visualization of the project status is essential, because it is well known that the human brain judges mainly by patterns and images. With a tabular planning (e.g. excel sheet) of hundreds of orders and countless resources with different start and end dates, it is not possible to judge whether a production order is on schedule or not.
In our Kaizen consulting for just-in-time production to reduce operating costs, we follow the motto "only results count"!