solution lean manufacturing lean manufacturing tools

Understanding When You Need Lean Manufacturing Tools

Traditional batch manufacturing is not delivering the operations performance expected from today's demanding customers and shareholders so many businesses are beginning to adopt the Toyota-inspired Lean manufacturing model and the Lean manufacturing tools associated with it. In an increasingly complex business environment experiencing the pressures of rapid and increasingly frequent change, the ability for Lean manufacturing tools to enable simulation of these changes becomes essential.

For example, a customer may give you a new forecast but you want to simulate optimistic or pessimistic views of these forecasts and strategize inventories according. Effective Lean manufacturing tools should provide line-of-balance and clear-to-build tools to avoid inventory build up on the shop floor while waiting on expedites. Knowing beforehand what is clear to release and taking the appropriate actions to clear the orders that need to be released can provide meaningful efficiencies to the business.

Many "Lean purists" believe that software is not needed for Lean Six Sigma programs. This may be true in high volume, low mix, and steady demand environments. If you desire a Lean supply chain, you should be asking yourself if this is the environment your business operates in or if you business is more accurately described as one dealing with: rapidly changing demand (volume and mix), complex and changing Bills of Materials, scarce production resources (material and capacity), long lead time components and new orders that must be validated across the production plan. If you are more the latter scenario, then ensuring you have the right Lean manufacturing tools to support your Lean Six Sigma initiatives will be critical.

RapidResponse Enables a Responsive and Lean Supply Chain

Kinaxis™ RapidResponse™ enables a responsive and Lean supply chain by facilitating lean planning. It satisfies two essential requirements; it helps ensure the right product and quantity are delivered to the right customer at the right time and it facilitates the flow of that product to the customer.

RapidResponse delivers on these requirements through four primary functions:

1. Providing tools to design and manage production resources
   • Provides supply chain visibility into component part usage for inventory stratification and point of use assignment
   • Analyzes and rationalizes the supply base
   • Calculates kanban sizes based on projected component requirements
   • Monitors key operations performance and strategic measures with Live Scorecard
   • Enables ad-hoc analysis easily by end users
2. Determining the date customer orders can be satisfied by considering all supplies and demands
3. Reducing time to communicate requirements throughout the supply chain
   • Provides the entire supply chain with instant visibility to changes
   • Integrates suppliers into decision making process
   • Enables high level of customer responsiveness
4. Ensuring orders can only be started once all the components are available (clear-to-build)
   • Ensure all components are available before releasing an order to the shop floor
   • Helps low volume/high mix lean manufacturing environments manage unique components with low usage and based on actual customer orders, not average usage
   • Reduces WIP through soft kitting and ensuring that you don't start work on an order until you have everything you need to finish it

The right lean manufacturing tools can make a difference, especially so in the most challenging of environments. RapidResponse incorporates the functionality you need to realize your Lean supply chain objectives.