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Extend Lean Beyond the Shop Floor
Published: 06/12/2009
(Apriso Inc.: Long Beach, CA) --Manufacturers embracing lean as a corporate philosophy understand that business processes must be steadily improved to gain efficiency, improve quality, cut waste, and enhance your value stream. However, achieving visibility and control to evaluate, measure, and improve these processes can be quite difficult, especially when spread across a distributed production and warehouse environment.
FlexNet Lean Material Flow is a lean solution from Apriso that eases tracking, management, and synchronization of material flows, business processes, and data spanning beyond production to warehouse operations. By creating custom bar code labels for individual bins, boxes, or pallets, materials can be more accurately tracked in real-time, providing global visibility and control to efficiently manage and streamline material flows. Manage work in process (WIP) from receiving through production, quality, finished goods assembly, and final customer shipment. Synchronize production, WIP, and enterprise resource planning systems to efficiently “pull” materials across production to eliminate warehouse inventory and increase quality—approaching zero parts per million defect rates for best-in-class customer satisfaction, while cutting costs and improving cash flow.
Developed in conjunction with Accenture, a global management consulting, technology services, and outsourcing company, this solution comprises the knowledge and industry best-practices gained through implementation at more than 150 locations of some of the world’s leading manufacturers. Valeo, a $12 billion global automotive supplier, played an important role in the design by identifying key tier-one automotive supplier requirements while ensuring adherence to lean principles.
Built on the FlexNet platform for global manufacturing operations management, FlexNet Lean Material Flow can be quickly implemented—typically in a few months—to rapidly affect manufacturing operations. As a platform-based solution, new functionality and process improvements can be quickly executed across the enterprise, contributing to a return on investment that is measured in months, not years.
Leveraging a unified data model and the embedded business processes of FlexNet, material flows are easily synchronized to span between production and warehouse activities, including those involving quality, maintenance, and other operations. Automated work flows are easily tracked and managed to achieve lean operations, ensuring low manufacturing and IT costs, high quality, and a greater degree of agility to respond faster to unexpected events.
The FlexNet platform facilitates the unique requirements of global manufacturing, including outsourced production, distributed suppliers, and multiple languages and cultures. FlexNet Lean Material Flow inherits these attributes, offering an IT architecture that supports unique local requirements for a plant or warehouse while at the same time enabling the standardization of business processes that are enforced globally.
Companies can implement FlexNet Lean Material Flow as a “center of excellence,” which can then be exported to each facility across their enterprise as a standardized best practice. At the same time, companies can retain unique local processes to support specific needs while ensuring complete visibility and tracking of your material flows.
This lean solution simplifies data transfer between business systems. Organizations are able to remove redundant applications, increase responsiveness, reduce training and support, while improving cash flow by maintaining a standardized, simplified interface to business systems with FlexNet’s Business Process Management capabilities. In addition, they can automatically transfer real-time manufacturing operations intelligence into their enterprise business systems to improve manufacturing responsiveness, data integrity, and their bottom line.
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