ERP Can Help With Lean Manufacturing

You’ve most likely heard every of the “Seven Deadly Wastes” a thousand times. You’ve additionally most likely put in some work to deal with the most important areas of waste at your organization, however have you ever been capable of leverage your ERP platform to assist on this area as properly?

Let’s check out every of the wastes, and at what may be accomplished to assist through the use of ERP in lean manufacturing environments.

1 — Transport Waste

Transport waste takes place if you transfer objects or materials from one space to a different with out including value to the products clients will ultimately obtain. It occupies an operator’s abilities, tools, and autos with out contributing to productive work.

To fight transport waste in your ERP, you’ll need to access tools that assist regulate manufacturing and logistics, so there’s no useless movement of products from one location to a different. You’ll additionally need a system that allows you to schedule and monitor using your transportation tools and rolling stock.

ERP may also help with going lean by giving immediate visibility into inventory-level information. If you’re unable to see stock levels, trends, and places in your present ERP, there’s an excellent probability transport waste is a minimum of partially to blame.

2 — Inventory Waste

Raw materials, items in manufacturing, and completed inventory sitting on cabinets doesn’t do any good to your clients. The longer any of your materials sits, whether or not completed or not, the longer it takes for that good to supply a revenue, subsequently contributing to inventory waste.

Inventory waste is usually a results of poor forecasting, bad manufacturing planning, and sub-optimal distribution practices. To overcome these challenges, the perfect ERP solutions have built-in functionality for supporting just-in-time (JIT) manufacturing, guaranteeing that not one of the means of manufacturing are ever in a state of non-movement. Functionality to look for consists of instruments that enhance forecasting accuracy, set reorder factors and min/max inventory levels, and the provision of historic merchandise information to trace gross sales historical past.

3 — Motion Waste

Waste of motion happens when a person or piece of equipment strikes in any way that doesn’t add value to a product. Poor structure of a manufacturing facility causes employees to move in a means that wastes time and vitality. Excessive wear and tear to equipment may also end result from an inefficient structure, resulting in additional movement waste.

Powerful ERP platforms can help you fine-tune your processes to include manufacturing times, facilitating higher distribution of kit workload. They additionally present the data context you must work with the tools suppliers, so you may make sure the machines you utilize are constructed and installed to work in essentially the most environment friendly means possible.

4 — Waiting

Any period of time the place progress isn’t being made on an item may be thought of ready. Waiting occurs on selections, info, equipment, and more. Waiting sometimes happens when staff members can’t decide because they lack info, departments aren’t in tune with one another, or manufacturing is halted by bottlenecks.

ERP can be utilized to eradicate the complications of waiting by providing easy availability of pertinent data. If end users can rapidly find the knowledge they should reach a call, there’s no want to attend on a response from another person. Robust manufacturing ERP solutions eradicate information bottlenecks, enabling fast resolution making. As technology continues to enhance, automation is changing into increasingly widely used as well, additional decreasing these dreaded wait times.

5 — Overproduction

Overproduction is commonly considered to be the worst of all of the wastes, largely because it contributes to all different wastes and it obscures the necessity for enchantment. Overproduction waste takes place if you manufacture more of an item than your customers need, or when it’s produced before it’s time to make a supply. This happens on account of bad provide chain management, procurement, and demand planning.

To counter this using your ERP, you’ll need visibility into your stock, and sufficient control to align manufacturing, purchasing, and warehousing along with your precise demand. You’ll need to use an ERP that acts as a single supply of your organization information across the whole supply chain. Having this visibility mixed with accurate demand forecasting means producers don’t have to err on the facet of warning and overproduce.

6 — Over-processing

Over-processing creates waste since you put more work right into a product than is definitely valued by a buyer. It may look good to color the within of that half that can by no means truly see the sunshine of day, but when your buyer doesn’t want it, you’re losing time and vitality. Over-processing is normally caused by a lack of normal working procedures.

To reduce over-processing utilizing your ERP, you’ll need to use tools that reduce the variety of human contact points during the processing stages. For instance, instead of getting a quote or spec order created by your sales team manually re-entered as a BOM, an ERP targeted on lowering over-processing will allow you to flip the quote right into a BOM instantly with one click on of a button (and even higher, it’ll flip the quote right into a BOM automatically!). The proper ERP may also permit the monitoring of productions to make sure that your organization is hitting the suitable KPIs and buyer goals.

7 — Defects

Defects waste time and materials on products that don’t live as much as high quality standards. They can result in adverse customer experiences, placing a strain on relationships and even end in misplaced clients. Defects additionally waste bodily technique of manufacturing.

Counteracting defects in ERP is a bit tougher than handling the opposite types of wastes, however good manufacturing-based ERP platforms give you the management to pinpoint deviations in quality as soon as they appear, stopping the manufacturing of faulty goods. The sooner these deviations in quality are found, the earlier an engineer can examine the difficulty earlier than it causes in depth downtime or damaged product.

Work With ERP, Not Against it

Using ERP to eradicate waste is possible. If your ERP has the right tools, you’ll be capable to take the steps crucial to improve your operations’ effectiveness. With a little know-how and energy, your enterprise can actively struggle sources of pointless waste by using ERP software and trimming down on extra or outdated processes that will have been holding you again with out your knowing.