Reduce Lead Times

The greater the demand for change in your products and the shortening of lead-time expectation places complex burdens on the planning and execution of their production. Seemingly impossible levels of agility are required on production assets that were seen now to be designed to support the rate of change.
 
For scheduling and operational planning this becomes compounded if a competitor can apparently deliver highly varied products with shorter lead times than you can promise. It is here that the potential gap between scheduling and operational realities is thrown into sharp focus. It is a case of a perfect theoretical scheduling world and an operational world that is fraught with overlapping day to day problems.
 
It can be the case the schedule looks OK and OEE is also high, but lead times are longer than what is needed to meet promised delivery. The traditional recourse is to use overtime or even to outsource production to meet promised delivery, both actions adversely affecting profitability.
 
EmsPT has encountered this situation and has frequently realised that there is adequate capacity in the existing manufacturing assets and that scheduling has to take into account both shop floor realities and the core pool of experience that exists within operators and supervisors. The determination of the actual capacity of resources, taking into account various routes through production which favour particular products produces a new model by which the planner can produce schedules which take into account real operational experience. This is achieved through the connection of scheduling with operational software that models production assets, monitors production execution and alerts planners to alarms and problems. This has the effect of reducing lead times by the issuing of more optimised schedules and making schedules adaptable to events.
 
When you need to reduce lead times would it help if you had a model of your production capacity, with optimised routes for particular products, with a schedule that was both optimised and reflected real time events? Shortening lead times and closing the gap between scheduling and production.