Re: MANUFACTURING SOFTWARE

Michael A. Terrell wrote:

Joerg wrote:

Kanban may not be all that bad. Introduced something similar together
with a production manager. I have never understood the concept of
"kitting". It just doesn't make sense to me.



It does, when there is a base model with several, or even dozens of
variations. The base model is considered a component as far as
production planning is concerned. It is very useful for small runs and
quick turn job shops. More than once we had an emergency order from an
important customer, and could pull a complete radio together in under
two weeks, instead of the six week, or longer order cycle. Boards that
were already in production were diverted to the emergency order, and the
ones made for that radio would replace them. We generally shipped
everything at least two weeks early, so the delay was never seen by the
customers.

At one point we had almost 100 base chassis in the production
stockroom, so all we needed was the IF and tuner modules, plus any
options, and that customer's EPROM for the front panel. that way, 90%
of the system assembly work was done before it hit final assembly. A
month or so later, most of them were gone, and we were back to a few in
stock. that extra stock let us claim an early delivery bonus from a
large contract. If the design wasn't kitted, we would have never made
it, and the bonus was $500,000.


In your type of design it wouldn't be very useful.


Many of my designs are similar. Big ultrasound machines with lots of options to pick from. With or without Doppler, ColorFlow, various disk drive sizes, filter modules for different transducers and so on. All our large systems are custom-configured, there is no such thing as standard models like you have with cars on dealer lots. Still the Kanban-style pull system was a lot better than kitting. Less inventory, less shop space need, plus lots of saving in labor since nobody was kitting anymore. So we left it to the floor manager to determine the number of starts. They were also allowed to pull whatever they thought they needed from stock, whenever they needed it. Of course this require a decent MRP system to stay on top of the stock forecasting.

There was initially some resistance because kitting seems to be the usual scenario in the US. But when leadtimes did not get worse and cost went down big time people began to like it. Special order leadtimes actually shrunk because system production never had to wait anymore for a kitting session to complete. They could start building right when the order bell rung. Yes, we did have a big old ship's bell that was rung whenever Sales called in a firm order. Could be heard clear across the parking lot ;-)

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com
.

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