DelmiaWorks – Your Lean Partner
I am frequently asked how DelmiaWorks can assist with Lean improvements in an organization.
Implementation of Lean is achieved through removal of waste. In Lean manufacturing, waste is any expense or effort that is expended but which does not transform raw materials into an item the customer is willing to pay for.
Implementing Lean in your organization means removing waste at your plant in a sustainable manner.
The two examples below share the ease of customizing DelmiaWorks to your business processes and how that can contribute to waste reduction.
Removing Data Manipulation Waste
Summary: DelmiaWorks' use of SAP Crystal Reports makes writing new reports or modifying current reports a breeze. In addition, reports can be sent at regular intervals, via IQAlert, directly to the users email box. That way, your team has the information they need in a format they can use.
In the example below, a daily process that took 20 min was eliminated. Unfortunately, most ERP users waste time manipulating information that they could otherwise receive directly.
Original task (risky & wasteful): manually exporting 3 different ‘out of the box’ reports, combining them into one report in Excel, and adding additional columns with formulas.
Risk: While copy/pasting the exported report some records can get overwritten or data modified as the information has been manipulated after it was downloaded from the ERP system.
Waste: Waste of the manager’s time. Why isn’t she getting all the information she needs directly from the ERP system sent to her at the interval needed?
Lean-ed task: One report directly from the source (ERP), with no external manipulation, emailed to the manager's inbox at the intervals required.
The story behind the scene: The finance manager came to ask for assistance in removing spaces from an exported report. She needed this report exported to MS-Excel for further processing and it exported with abundance of extra spaces that she then needed to remove. Further conversation revealed that this report was one of three reports that got exported only to be combined into one MS-Excel spreadsheet. She was required to send this spreadsheet to upper management on a daily basis.
The finance manager was proud of how efficient she got at downloading, cleaning and combining the 3 reports. She was so proud of reducing the overall time to 20 min that she never stopped to ask herself why she had to do it at all.
Achieving Lean via ERP Customization of Unique Business Processes
Summary: As unique as we all like to think our plants are, manufacturing companies share 90% of their DNA. Yet it is that 10% that is different that is our ‘special sauce’. DelmiaWorks removes waste by meeting your ‘special sauce’ needs. Using user fields, you can add information that is specific to how you run your business and eliminate the need for an external customized system to manage that information.
In the example below, in order to meet a strategic customer’s needs, a company had to be able to switch, at a drop of a hat, between shipping any of 6 different flavor of a given product. The shared BOM for those 6 products was 8 levels deep and included over 1350 SKU’s with approximately 15% (185) of the SKU’s differentiating between the different flavors of the end product. The ability to customize saved a production line supervisor 4 hours a week and provided reliable data to the decision makers.
Original task (risky & wasteful): The supervisor would manually review the status of the 185 critical SKU’s and summarize them in MS-Excel. This took 2 hours of uninterrupted time, twice a week (total 4 hours)
Risk: The information would be outdated by the time the last item information was entered into MS-Excel as the plant was running 24/7 and the SKU’s were being processed continuously. This would hinder the ability to meet customers' changing shipment needs.
Waste: Waste of the supervisor’s time. While the ERP has the information the supervisor needs, most ERP systems, out of the box, are limited in their ability to create unique process specific differentiation. The supervisor manually entered the information in a format that helped make decisions but required 4 hours of data entry.
Lean-ed task: Critical SKU’s were identified via the DelmiaWorks custom user fields. The status of those items was sent via IQAlert to all managers, supervisors and leads that worked on this product line so that they could make informed decisions based on the customers' changing shipment needs.
The story behind the scene: While DelmiaWorks provided an excellent inventory report based on exploded BOM that goes up to six levels deep , this product line had a BOM tree that was 8 levels deep. It also had many items on the BOMs that were not relevant for the needed analysis, hence a custom way of differentiating between the relevant and the non-relevant items had to be devised .
The critical 15% of SKU’s were identified via the user fields in the Inventory Module. That provided the supervisor access to the exact information he required without the ‘noise’ of the less critical 85% of SKU’s.
The customization allowed for quick and accurate reply to a strategic customers needs. There was no longer a need to spend 4 hours a week updating the information and 30 min to verify it once the customer called. Now, all stakeholders received the information daily and when the customer called it took 5 min to identify how soon the requested change in delivery could be accommodated.