Demand-driven manufacturing involves some tough decisions. If any part is delayed, it throws out your entire delivery schedule and upsets your customers. Yet you can’t keep a huge inventory just in case. It defeats the object: keeping costs down.
IBS Manufacturing has been specifically designed to help you make the best decisions in demand-driven or flow production. It supports any planning method, will help you optimize machine use and generates the workflow needed for everything to happen smoothly. Importantly, it helps you manage material use to keep costs in check without compromising customer service.
The software offers a variety of planning methods but the big two are:
- Pull planning which is best suited to optimizing repetitive manufacturing based on forecasts of your customer demand.
- MRP II for traditional forward material and capacity planning, which may be more appropriate for one-off or project-based manufacture or where demand is unpredictable.
You can define the priorities set in pull planning to create planning methods specific to your way of manufacturing. These means, for example, the software can be tailored to suite the layout of your machinery.
Forecasts of customer demand and the availability of components are at hand because the system is integrated with IBS’ Demand Planning and Supply Planning.
Because it is specifically designed for flow processes, IBS Manufacturing supports the idea of co-products. For example, if you have several variants of a design, it will enable you to start manufacture before you know what the demand for each is. It will check materials and capacity as you finalize the product. You can also make sub-assemblies or modules for more flexible manufacture.
Planning work flow
IBS Manufacturing helps you allocate machinery, fixtures and tools to optimize their use. It generates effective plans, taking into account the need for service and calibration. It is integrated with IBS Service.
You can use forward or backward planning to link materials to the operations where they are needed. This allows you to manage inventory costs: materials are purchased to arrive for the right part of the production cycle.
When a sales order is created, IBS Manufacturing will perform a rough-cut disposal check: the materials and capacity required are assessed against what’s in stock. If there is a problem with any of the components, it will generate a best delivery date for your customer.
IBS Manufacturing will also help you by:
- Generating documents including kitting lists, operation lists, materials cards and product labels.
- Tracking products and components.
- Pallet handling: if you use IBS’ Warehouse Management module you can identify and control stock by pallet rather than by individual item.
- You can manage the order, timing and delivery of subcontract operations.
- Quality control reporting.
- Cost-price simulation to test variations in materials or to check different manufacturing routes and see what effect they have on costs.
Reporting from the shop floor
IBS Manufacturing takes data from the workcentre to generate reports to help you assess the effectiveness of your operations. This helps you monitor:
- Materials used.
- Products manufactured.
- The quantities being scrapped.
- The time people are spending on each job
- Machine use.
- Costs.
Work in progress can be analyzed on line so you can compare actual performance with your plans and spot any problems before they become too major.
IBS Planner View offers an intuitive way into your manufacturing data, enabling you set speedometer visualisation of your performance or create graphs from your reports.