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Custom Manufacturing

Who dares to play the Russian Roulette

Russian Roulette is a lethal game of chance in which participants place a single round in a revolver, spin the cylinder, place the muzzle against their head and pull the trigger. The game is usually associated with big prize money and the chances of winning are 5/6. However there are 1/6 chances of getting shot. Not many people come forward to play this game.


Custom Manufacturing

Dealing with Emperor’s new clothes

How does one optimize in an environment of changing product mix coupled with variability in resource loading, while at the same time, maximize plant output along with delivery performance? Looks like a hopeless situation for a plant manager but an exciting problem for a theoretician and hence a great market for an IT product.


Custom Manufacturing

Reliability of delivery: brand positioning opportunity for custom manufacturing organizations

The only performance which can make a perceptual difference to a customer is when a supplier has on-time delivery performance of near 100% as per originally committed date to the consumer...


Custom Manufacturing

What is new in simplified DBR?

DBR was developed in the mid 80s as a relatively simple, yet effective, production planning methodology. DBR centers on detailed finite capacity scheduling of the capacity resource constraint (CCR). DBR was developed under the assumption of getting orders from the sales, without truly impacting the committed dates, and coming up with the best planning possible under the circumstances.


Custom Manufacturing

How bad are local efficiency measures?

Plant managers are torn between the chronic conflict of pushing specific orders in full out of the plant versus taking actions to maximize plant output. If in a time period, they get the best output, the immediate next is followed in much reduced output as order completion takes the front seat. The conflict manifests itself in various inter-departmental meetings...


Custom Manufacturing

Standing on the shoulder of the giants

Article by Eli Goldratt, published with due permission. © Eli Godratt

Standing on the Shoulders of GiantsGiven that Toyota is the flagship of Japan’s industry, one should expect that Lean would be widely implemented in Japan. Surprisingly, this is not the case. Less than 20% of the manufacturers in Japan have implemented Lean.


Custom Manufacturing

Planning Improvement Projects

Knowing WHAT TO improve is as important as knowing WHEN TO improve and WHAT NOT to improve!

Last month, I made a trip to 2 different plant locations of a company. Both the locations produced the same range of SKUs with almost the same volume of production per month.