Cost Effective, High Speed High-Mix, Low-Volume Manufacturing; In Warehouses and Distribution Centers too.

High-Mix, Low-Volume manufacturing is always interesting. In fact, factory physics concepts are also very relevant to value-added activities in warehoures and distribution centres as well. How do we reduce changover and setup times for kitting, packing, assembly, quality control operations for different kinds of products? This is especially critical to Singapore where 80% of its cargo are transhipped. We need high value add and high velocity in our manufacturing and distribution operations.

For small and medium sized enterprises, managing variability can be tricky. How many times do one need to counsel a slower staff, how do we set standards without letting the team find better ways of doing things?

What is more important then, is to understand how inventory, time, capacity buffers interact with variability to find the optimal portfolio for your company.

Variability flows through the process, and a spreadsheet to understand gather process times, process time variability, machine availability, machine repair, machine failure times, batch size, yield, setup time, setup time variation and the costs associated can help companies refine their operations using inventory, capacity and time levers. What's more, if you have high-mix, low volume operations, you can find out how much your machines are utilized from doing different mixes of products. You can see how high utilization interacts with process variability and effective process time (VUT)

Visibility systems for responsiveness often minimizes inventory. We have to be very careful with this though. To minimize inventory and still be very responsive, one must have high capacity buffer.

These fundamental relationships are even more important with the enterprise resource planning, warehouse management systems, transportation management systems implementation.

Get the spreadsheet template at: https://sites.google.com/site/fastsupplychains/templates