Material balancing is a great system to find “material leaks” where money goes to the drain whiteout anyone noticing it. It is similar to inventory counts that we do in warehouses but in this case we do not only count inventory but also the amount of inventory in WIP and we search for material leakages. This is a very easy to make system that help us save a lot of money.
Author: Gal Merom
Using Sawtooth model – constant time between purchase orders
This post is the continuation of the How the Sawtooth model works. If you haven’t read it, read it before
Inventory management – using consignment
Consignment is a significant inventory planning method. The idea is that the customer is paying for the goods only when it is consumed (or sold).
It is an excellent system for the client but also for the supplier that saves a lot of waste in the supply chain.
How to make a consignment agreement and why.
Inventory management using Kanban
Kanban is a “magical” inventory management system. It requires no databases and no gadgets. Yet, it allows organizations with a lot of parts to manage them almost without much planning. It is very useful and I am recommending it every time it fits.
This post is all about the Kanban system, with examples and recipes on how to make it works.
As always please add a “LIKE” to the Facebook page so others can also find this post.
Formula compare – production efficiency
Sometimes the best way to improve the production is to look at the differences between what materials we planned to use ver. what we actually used. It supposes to be the same, but if you have more then 1 material that you can use as a substitute then probably your planned and actual cost per batch are not the same in some cases. That allows you to find places to do a major improvement. This post is not easy but very important.
Production planning in very complex organizations
Sometimes the production is too complicated with too many steps to let us use conventional production planning. We will need an online tool that will prioritize the tasks instead of trying to plan and schedule the production.
Right first time: Using SPC to improve RFT
Starting production with the right parameters with low scrap and almost no time consumption is important for production efficiency.
RFT=right first time
RFT is a challenging task for most production organizations that produces many products/parts.
Using SPC is a good way to solve problems regarding RFT.
How can we find the parameter that we can improve, out of hundreds of products and dozens of parameters that each product has in its spec?
Cycle time break down
Reducing cycle time is a very important advantage we can get in the market.
In order for us to reduce the cycle time, we got to understand what are the elements that the cycle time is made off.
In this post, we explore the way we can create a cycle time breakdown. We can then take every element and improve it.
Improving processes – removing NVA
Processes can be improved. First we need to map The activities to see which gives value and which not (NVA). In the following post we will start with example and on the next posts i will add the know how methodology
Material balancing – finding material leakage
In today’s organizations we have a lot of acquired items and raw materials. Although most organizations have well organized methods of the flow of material, it is very difficult to find material leakages. They have a direct effect on the bottom line since it is money spend on material that was not taken into consideration during the costing phase. In this post: how to find the leakages and how to reduce their unknown part.
ABC inventory planning
ABC model allow us to plan our inventory in a smart way. We refer to each item as part of a group. Some groups are important and we micro manage them and some not.
Production planning in a simple organization
How to plan the production in a simple organization. From batch size to batch priority and inventory policies.
Actual costing
Actual costing allows us to understand what is the real cost of producing batches and products. This is a very powerful tool to find batches with a lot of waste and batches with a lot of efficiency
Capacity model with balance algorithm
To better reflect reality in a capacity model we allow more than one tool for each product. We need to use Balancing algorithm to make sure we balance the loading on each tool to reflect the actual capacity constrains
Building a capacity model – first post
In this post, we will learn what a capacity model is, which types of models are available, how to build
Production planning and scheduling- Methods for different organizational types
Production planning and control is always a big challenge for large organizations. Control and optimized production can help an organization