Lean Manufacturing - Seradex ERP Solutions

Lean Manufacturing - Seradex ERP

Lean is a business philosophy focused on eliminating non value adding activities. Lean means doing things as simply and cheaply as possible, while providing superior quality and very quick delivery. Lean Manufacturing is "manufacturing without waste." Waste has many forms including material, time, idle equipment and inventory. Most companies waste a large percentage of their available resources. This presents an enormous opportunity for cost savings. Lean Manufacturing can help improve material handling, inventory, quality, scheduling, personnel and customer satisfaction.

Much of this waste is invisible. Identifying and eliminating the waste is not easy. Lean manufacturing is a standardized process to attack waste. The main principles of Lean Manufacturing are:

• Value Stream Mapping - to identify value added and non value added activities
• Cellular and Flow Manufacturing - to reduce travel distance and simplify routings
• Pull Scheduling (Kanban) to reduce inventory and reduce cycle times
• Rapid Setup - to reduce lot sizes and inventory
• Team Development - to implement the new processes

If you check out the links below you can see companies are seeing dramatic improvements:

• Increase productivity by 40-60%
• Reduce inventory by 50-75%
• Improve quality by 50-70%
• Reduce lead time by 25-75%

Seradex ERP & Lean Manufacturing

Seradex supports both push (work order) and pull (agile, cell, flow, JIT, lean) manufacturing processes. You can mix and match to suit your requirements. Most ERP systems do not support lean manufacturing. In fact these systems are actually anti-lean! The accepted ERP approach has been to build to stock from a forecast. This approach builds in waste and non value added activities. Seradex was designed from the ground up to support make to order and lean manufacturing. Seradex ERP software offers many powerful features and very simple operation to support lean manufacturing initiatives including:

Customer Order Management

• Seradex software does not support build to forecast or SOP - it supports demand flow
• Product Configurator allows quick entry of complex customer orders
• Automated signals to purchasing for buy to order items
• Automated warnings where large orders violate Kanban inventory levels
• Automated tools to import or download customer orders
• Web based order status tools keep customers up to date
• Automated promise date calculation based on Takt calculations
• Automated Heijunka Scheduling to level load production

Supply Chain and Inventory Management

• Built in Electronic Kanban creates a seamless link to suppliers
• Daily Vendor Delivery Schedules for non Kanban items
• Data to identify long lead items, promote supplier consolidation and increase inventory turns
• Support for Blanket PO's and Kanban signaled Releases
• Share point of sale data with suppliers
• Backflush on production completion
• Dynamic Reorder Point and Quantity Updating
• Automated A, B and C Item classification
• Inventory control by location enabling point of use inventory management

Continuous Improvement on the Shop Floor

• Historical Routing Analysis - analyze routing sequences to optimize plant and cell layout
• Eliminates time consuming and waste of useless data collection
• Monitor selected set-up times, scrap and downtime to drive fact based continuous improvement
• Provide data and analysis on move and idle time to improve flow
• Engineering tools to quickly simplify, flatten and modularize bills of material
• Automated method sheets and CAD information
• Incorporate 5S improvements into method sheets

Technology Platform

• A Technology Platform that is open, low cost and allows easy data processing and extraction
• Easy integration with other systems - internal and external
• Quickly adapt system to improvements identified by Kaizen Blitz
• Fast and simple information visibility
• Lean accounting and administration

Besides the excellent functionality in Seradex to support Lean Manufacturing there are many organizational skills that also need to be developed. These include people development, business process design, education and often overcoming resistance to change. Seradex has proven implementation services to help you deal with these issues.