|
|
|
News Services Consulting Customer Support Scheduling Technology Research Professional Place
|
With these, the life blood of any manufacturing enterprise, there is almost always the temptation to make promises the customer wants to hear. Aside from price perhaps, the most important thing a customer wants to know is "when can he get his parts?". It is not possible to overstate how important it is to determine reliable delivery dates from the outset, especially if this is a final, mutually-agreed-upon delivery schedule. This answer not only affects the delivery of the new customer order, but can also adversely affect the delivery schedules for customer orders to which you have already committed. Booking new customer orders almost always means that the work proceeding therefrom must compete with already-committed shop work orders for available capacity. The question arises, "can the required capacity be made available on all applicable machine resources when it's needed in order to meet a proposed delivery schedule?". If capacity from one or more heavily loaded machine resources is required in the desired time frame, this answer is not always forthcoming. Using PROSPAC, however, production control simply submits the new customer orders as forecasted shop work orders. Then the scheduling "engine" calculates schedules for both existing committed shop work orders and new work orders alike. Now compare the resulting Shop Work Order Status Report to the prior one where the forecasted shop work orders are absent. At this point it's going to be obvious whether or not the new shop work orders can be delivered to the customer as proposed, plus the impact that will have on existing customer delivery commitments. If existing shop work orders can still be delivered as promised and the forecasted work orders can be delivered as proposed, you can quote or commit to the proposed delivery schedules of the forecasted shop work orders and release them as regular production work orders.
What if ...? Eventually, however, you will sell enough capacity to where the forecasted work orders cannot be delivered as proposed. When this happens PROSPAC offers you a production planning capability simply called the "What if ... ?" mode. The "What if ...?" mode is where you can propose all kinds of changes to your shop, and then see what would happen if those changes were implemented. The following are some of the basic tools used to structure a "What if ..." proposal:
Of course using these tools does not necessarily guarantee that changing certain aspects of your shop's capabilities will make it possible to deliver the forecasted work orders as proposed. What they allow you to accomplish, however, is to either (1)develop a new production plan that will simultaneously meet the demands of existing customer delivery commitments as well as those of the forecasted work orders, or (2) determine that it is not possible to keep existing customer delivery commitments and also accept the forecasted work orders as proposed. If the latter becomes the case and no further proposals are acceptable, the company is forced to make some tough choices. These decisions lie beyond the pale of PROSPAC and ultimately address issues of organizational integrity as well as individual customer relations and the company's policies relating thereto. Because there is such an irresistible tendency to commit the company to something that's not achievable just to get the new customer order, it is vitally important that those in production management and upper management, particularly sales, be of one mind when upper management feels constrained to make a deceptive choice, namely, promising something they know they probably cannot deliver. It is one thing to deceive the customer. It is quite another to deceive yourselves, when those in production management or those on the shop floor are somehow expected to perform the impossible. Such practices generally undermine everyone's confidence in PROSPAC's schedules long before there is acknowledgment as to what the real problem is. The management team must therefore direct its operations as a cohesive unit!
|
|
Send mail to webmaster@heuristima.com
with questions or comments about this web site.
|
