B&K Corporation Selects Encompix ETO ERPWritten by Roger Meloy
B&K Corporation has two Michigan manufacturing plants, one in Fenton and one in Saginaw. The company founded in 1952 recently transformed their technology process by implementing ETO (Engineer-to-Order) ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) Leader Encompix, based in Cincinnati, OH.Kurt Kuck, CFO for B&K shared some of operational challenges company faced on a daily basis prior to Encompix implementation. Kuck noted, “We are a special order business. Every order we get is different in some regard, but many of our machines have some commonality to them. Our tendency was that when we received a new order, we had not simplified method of identifying what we could use from previous orders. That approach just added to cost. What was needed was some standardization.” Kuck also on lack of efficiency in old Syteline system from Symix (now Infor Global Systems). “Syteline was fine for tracking material and labor costs. But what was lacking was capability to bring it all together into a job cost system that we could use for percentage of completion.” Kuck noted they did not have a real time system. It was a very paper intensive system. The company would go into monthly job cost meetings that lasted hours and with three inch books of paper with all project budget recaps. The Syteline data was three weeks old.
| | Internal Supermarket Consumption Signals Replenishment Key To Lean Manufacturing via E-KanbanWritten by Sam Bayer
Internal SuperMarket Consumption Signals Replenishment: The use of supermarkets is a kanban best practice. They insure steady availability of material to consuming cells, albeit at a cost of maintaining some inventory buffer. But how do supermarkets stay stocked at minimum inventory levels? Manufacturers, like DJ Orthopedics has linked supermarket electronically to internal suppliers in their machine shop. This level of e-kanban Lean efficiency is accomplished through Signum, product of Datacraft Solutions (www.datacraftsolutions.com).Fax Kanban is Not Efficient and Not Lean At ten minutes per fax, someone is spending 3.5 hours per day in administration time. That inefficiency results in less time to utilize more suppliers or improve relationships with existing suppliers.
|
