Go for a much, much better lean

Many manufacturers are struggling to get their lean/APS (advanced planning and scheduling) and Heijunka strategies right because of the pressures they are under to conform to practices that, according to Preactor International's technical director Graham Hackwell, are too proscriptive and, frankly, just not working. "Those manufacturers are not coping particularly well, simply because many consultants in the lean environment are preaching a mantra of 'no IT, no system, no nothing' - effectively leaving their clients to control a process that is virtually uncontrollable," he warns. By way of example, Hackwell cites a Japanese car manufacturer that Preactor has been working with in the UK where, he says, everything is lean. "This particular organisation supplies injection-moulded components and has two fundamental problems. In order to complete the injection moulding it has to operate three shifts, whereas the assembly plant only works two. "So it can't make at the same rate as the assembly plant absorbs its components. Coupled with that, if it were only to make at the same rate, it would end up with very small batches and too many changeovers - so even with a three-shift system it couldn't make enough. Scheduling solution "Clearly, this manufacturer needs to make in economic batch quantities. However, there are complex calculations to determine how many of each product would have to be made at any one time, on any particular day, in order to ensure the line-side stores in the assembly plant don't run out." And it's not the only one. "This organisation is trying to solve a scheduling problem, but there are many more businesses out there suffering in the same way - potentially in silence - because they've been told they're running lean and can't have IT to help them." What Preactor offers, by contrast, are tools that allow manufacturers to manage precisely such processes. "First and foremost, these are 'what if' tools that are highly interactive," says Hackwell, "particulary the top-end Preactor 400 [geared towards APS] and Preactor 300 [for finite scheduling and capacity planning]. "And the Heijunka part, for us, is just like buying Microsoft Excel: once you have it, you can write as many spreadsheets as you like. We call our 'spreadsheets' configurations: Heijunka scheduling, for example, is simply a configuration of Preactor. It's the same product used in a new way to solve a slightly different problem." In this way, he insists, Preactor is about improving the efficiency of a manufacturer's processes - just like lean - and solving their delivery performance problems. The key differentiators are realism and flexibility, as Hackwell explains. "Generally, there are three key factors that need to be considered: delivery performance, finished goods stock and excess capacity. If you are managing to hit one of these - say, delivery performance - it's likely to be because you are carrying excess stock and/or you have excess capacity, both of which are costing the business money. "So manufacturers are coming to us saying their delivery performance isn't that bad, but that they believe they can bring greater efficiency to their processes and so make themselves more competitive." Preactor customers use their solutions in a plethora of ways, but removing whole rafts of temporary staff and overtime from their operations, while moving even more product through their plants, is a classic. "In the end," says Hackwell, "that's all lean is about: making the process more efficient and effective." He believes the industry has become too focused on some of the terminology and acronyms: lean, sadly, being a case in point. "Most manufacturing managing directors would say their businesses are lean. After all, lean is almost a fashion accessory these days. But how well they are using lean is debatable. Is it having a significant positive impact on their processes?" His message for 2007 to anyone that has so far failed to embrace the tools that could lead to improved performance is this. "Competition from the low-cost economies will get fiercer. But there's an opportunity for UK manufacturers to put in the effort to make their processes much more efficient and to take advantage of the fact that they are much closer to their markets, which is always going to be in their favour. "Now is the time to make that change happen - not when it's a fire-fight."