Truly lean operations enable Demand Driven Manufacturing to become a reality. Truly lean operations enable real time decision making by factory personnel on the floor. Truly lean operations require decision support and execution tools that support and sustain this process model across the factory and throughout the enterprise.
The Factory Logic Lean Operations suite enhances and extends your Oracle investment and enables truly lean operating processes to extend to the factory floor where Demand Driven Manufacturing becomes a reality.
With an investment in Oracle Supply Chain Planning or PeopleSoft Enterprise Supply Chain Management applications your enterprise has the fundamentals in place for a successful lean deployment. These fundamentals include the establishment of master data defining the manufacturing process, the establishment of communication channels up and down the extended supply chain and the ability to manage demand forecasts.
The next step is to tie those fundamentals together into a solution that embodies lean principles and implements tried-and-tested lean operational logic and empowers the work teams on the floor. With its strong XML integration technology and its educate-the-users design approach, Factory Logic's Lean Operations Management suite helps you achiev this objective. For a factory with an established Oracle infrastructure the first step is typically to integrate the Factory Logic Pacemaker Planning module with one of the Oracle forecasting modules (Manufacturing Scheduling, Demand Planning, Collaborative Planning or Advanced Planning) and with master data for the factory's pacemaker process. The benefits of this initial step include:
- Putting factory scheduling and real time decision making support on the factory floor
- Establish pacemaker processes that are more agile, more resilient to disruption and more efficient in its use of inventory, labor and time.
- Create and sustain leveled pull signals, absent the bull-whip effect, delivered via Oracle Flow Manufacturing to upstream operations. Consistent and level pull, unlike forecast, reduces the supplier costs and contributes and adds directly to performance improvement capability.
- Determine ideal inventory levels, trigger points and alert levels by combining operational metrics gathered by Oracle Flow Manufacturing with Factory Logic's modeling of capacity for complex multiple-tool manufacturing processes.
- Sustain the thousands of Kanban Loops within the enterprise with minimal user intervention through automatic monitoring of changes to the recommended loop sizes, target and alert levels. This data is sent to Flow Manufacturing or any external kanban tracking system already in place.
- Use agile, leveled production schedules produced by Factory Logic's Pacemaker Planning Module as input to Oracle Discrete Manufacturing, for use in shop floor operations.
Setting the Pace through Level Scheduling
Level Scheduling principles state that a production schedule for pacemaker operations uses a stable takt time with as small a lot size as possible will smooth material flow throughout the factory.
A smooth material flow then enables synchronization across the entire supply chain, as production and consumption rates rise and fall in unison to meet changing demand.
The Factory Logic Pacemaker Scheduler contains the most advanced scheduling algorithm available for manufacturing operations that require leveled scheduling on a large scale:
- A production model for processes with variable run-rates, variable staffing levels, production splitting, sequence-based production and changeover constraints.
- Support for a mixture of leveled production items and build-to-order items in the same schedule.
- In collaboration with a real-time production tracking system, Factory Logic detects disruptive events - shifts in customer demand or execution problems, assesses their impact on the manufacturing operations and responds rapidly in order to keep the supply-chain in line with customer demand. Decisions are made in minutes vs. hours.
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