Issue link: http://www.insightdigital.biz/i/74682
Ideal Products: ne company that is successfully implementing a non-traditional approach is Ideal Products of Oshkosh, a machining shop founded in 1947. Like many job shops, Ideal had operated successfully for years using traditional thinking. It had a traditional ERP system, used only for order entry and accounting. Quoting, purchasing, bill of materials (BOM), quality control and scheduling functions were assisted by a hodgepodge of disjointed spreadsheets. Capacity awareness was nonexistent. David Verhoff, who took over as president of Ideal in 2010, realized that the company's growth, as well as its ability to satisfy the demands of its customers, was limited by its traditional systems. "Before implementing our new planning/ scheduling system, scheduling was ad-hoc. Information was unorganized," Verhoff says. "We just relied on the shop to try to meet delivery dates, with limited resources and limited ability to know what work was coming. There was no common focus for the shop to prioritize work." O The company had functioned this way for decades, he says. It worked as long as customers accepted the company's limited ability to hit delivery dates. But as customers became more sophisticated, Ideal needed a better system. "In every company I've worked with, the primary cause of issues is poor communication. The vision for the new system was to facilitate across the company communication, to allow us to easily understand what was going on in the shop with near real-time accuracy," Verhoff says. "Our system is completely different than anything I've ever seen. Unlike most systems, the computer doesn't do the finite scheduling. It does macro scheduling, and the shop board does finite scheduling, to minimize our critical path time through the shop. Within one to three months, guys in the shop could foresee bottlenecks and remove them. It's become such an integral part of our start with a couple of guys and a few machine tools. Planning and scheduling are pretty simple: "Hey Joe, A case study in job-shop planning and scheduling | BY DOUG BENGSON business that we couldn't do what we do without it. It's the collective brain of the company. "We're able to communicate issues to our customers and work with them to meet dates critical to their operation. In many cases if we can give a customer advance notice of issues, they can adjust their schedule without any consequence to us or to them. Our customers get advance notice of potential issues, and we have the ability to prioritize correctly to make sure we are meeting their critical needs. "Everybody's happy. One customer has told us that because of the amount and quality of information we give them, they don't need to manage us on a day to day basis. They know if there is going to be an issue we will notify them. "We needed a system that enables our company to capitalize on our strengths and minimize our weaknesses, and I can't get that from an off-the-shelf package. Our involvement in designing this system provided an opportunity to educate everyone on the principles behind lean, quick-response manufacturing (QRM) and flow manufacturing (in which a product progresses through its manufacturing processes without stopping), as well as gaining a better understanding among all of our functional groups. We drove the system to provide us with the results we need instead of the system driving us to accept what was already programmed." Verhoff says Ideal has a well-functioning system now that is helping the company to produce great results for its customers. "But as we continually improve and grow our company, we need to be able to have a system that is as agile with information as we are at manufacturing. It's taken a company-wide effort from a dedicated team of top-notch people, but it's been worth it tenfold. Not only are we able to do more work with less stress, we're also positioning ourselves to grow our company with a system that can support twice our current sales without having to make any changes." F which customer is screaming the loudest for their parts? Do you want to run them or should I?" As shops add people and machines, scheduling is oſten done by a guy running around with a stack of paper, telling everybody what to work on. At some point, the owner hears the siren call www.insightonmfg.com of an ERP salesman and takes the plunge to purchase an off-the-shelf, black box program that is "guaranTEED" to solve all his problems. Months later, he realizes he bought a program that does a decent job of accounting, order entry, purchasing, bill of materials (BOM), etc., but is ineffective at planning and scheduling. Instead of reaching scheduling nirvana, the company is stuck with a computer- continued> July 2012 • INSIGHT on Manufacturing | 25