Electronic Kanban, Not Fax to Signal ReplenishmentWritten by Sam Bayer
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.
| | Peggy Smedley of Start Magazine to Address PRONTO North America Users ConferenceWritten by Tom Verzi
Peggy Smedley is editor of Start Magazine and will be addressing first annual PRONTO North America Users Conference on Thursday, May 5th. Smedley was recently profiled in Wall Street Journal and authored Mending Manufacturing, How America Can Manufacture its Survival. She is an award-winning journalist. Wednesday, May 4th, Thomas R. Cutler, CEO of TR Cutler, Inc., author of Manufacturers Public Relations and Media Guide, Associate Editor of Industrial Connection, and Contributing Editor to InMFG magazine will be addressing PRONTO North America Users Conference. Cutler is also founder of Manufacturing Media Consortium, a group of 2000 journalists writing about various aspects of manufacturing and industrial trends. PRONTO North America, (www.prontoerp.com) based in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, is North American Master Distributor of PRONTO-Xi, a comprehensive software system allowing manufacturers,
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