Ditch Production Strategies That Constantly Fall Short
By: Phenix Planning
Tags: Supply Chain Management, Manufacturing Software, Supply Chain, Manufacturing

Ditch Production Strategies That Constantly Fall Short

Manufacturers often create production strategies that aren’t executable on the plant floor day-to-day, making it difficult, if not impossible, to meet supply chain goals. By bridging the silos between the production plan and its execution, you’ll start achieving service, throughput, and inventory objectives that previously seemed out of reach.

Your business objectives are in a state of flux because of constant changes in the market?

You are not alone! Supply and demand volatility can throw a wrench into many production strategies. Good plans, however, anticipate change and have built-in flexibility that enables agility when faced with the unexpected. With a solid production strategy in place, you’ll no longer lose sleep over changing market conditions.

Get started: Improve your production strategy

Hop on a path to consistently achieve your business objectives with these five best practices:

1. Link the business strategy and production strategy. Use your business strategy to define the essential inputs to the production strategy, such as customer lead times, ordering policies, service levels or fill rates, inventory levels or constraints, working capital goals, capacity available, and capacity expansion plans.

2. Carefully consider your current environment. Gain a clear understanding of customer requirements, volume and mix, forecast error, volume variability, manufacturing efficiency, and manufacturing variability. Segment products by variability, volume, and customer importance. Incorporate strategies that identify the products that should be run together. Understand the efficiency and predictability of internal operations and work to continually improve them.

3. Use mathematics and analytics to confirm the production strategy will meet the business objectives. Make sure the production strategy is achievable. Use analytical tools that incorporate customer service, capacity, and inventory to predict results and enable balanced decision–making to meet the business goals. Incorporate inventory space, capacity utilization and loading, cycle stock production frequencies and quantity calculations, and keep the data up to date as conditions change.

4. Use scenario planning to inform decisions. Anticipate variability. Assess the likely range of supply and demand. Create scenarios to predict what might happen and create contingency plans. Put guardrails in place to indicate when the results are on track and when something needs to be adjusted or resolved.

5. Use approaches that enable agility. With an achievable strategy, contingency plans, and guardrails in place, you’ll be able to focus on the truly unexpected events. Analytical capacity and understanding your capabilities and constraints will help you rapidly formulate new responses to changes in supply and demand or unexpected equipment failure.

Achieve your goals despite the unexpected — all without breaking a sweat

Break down the internal silos to ensure alignment between the production strategy and the business strategy. Gain a deep understanding of your current environment and factor it into your strategic planning. Leverage mathematics, analytics, and scenario planning to confirm you’re on track, the production strategy is achievable, and the right contingency plans are in place. And throughout every step of the way, embrace agility!

Supported by Zinata Inc., Product Wheel scheduling was introduced at AFP advanced food products llc to achieve more balanced scheduling capable of supporting the company’s growth. Phenix executes the schedules to seamlessly sustain the gains from the production strategy, enabling business objectives to be met. “Product Wheel methodologies have captured 15 years of Master Scheduler tribal knowledge and complexity into the Phenix Tool for expansion of our business.”

Bring your strategy to next level status

Improve your ability to consistently meet business objectives with a bullet proof production strategy. Contact us to connect with an experienced member of our team to start talking about the specific challenges your plant is experiencing, and identify how to move forward with a production strategy that will give you a competitive edge — each and every day. Contact us today!