IMTS 2018 Conference: A Paradigm Shift in Shop Floor Scheduling: Can LEAN / TOC Principles Make Finite Capacity Scheduling Simpler and More Effective?

Plan to attend The IMTS 2018 Conferences to gain deeper insights into new manufacturing technologies and ideas!

About the topic 

Most manufacturing companies continue to struggle with getting their orders done and shipped to their customers on time. On-time Delivery (OTD) percentages of most companies are less than 90%. Many are lower than 80%.  Those that maintain higher than 90% OTD often resort to heroic extra efforts, overtime, and/or expedited material, all of which take a toll on a company’s bottom-line. 

Scheduling the shop floor is not an easy task. It takes a lot of work and focus to go live on Advanced Planning and Scheduling software whether standalone or embedded in your ERP. The speaker explains why traditional shop floor scheduling is such a struggle for most manufacturers.

Several Continuous improvement principles from LEAN and TOC will be introduced, including:

• What are you quoting customers for lead times vs your actual value-added touch-time? Are you selling yourself short? Do you have potential to reduce lead times?
• Shop floor prioritization – Is due date the best way to prioritize your orders/jobs?
• Little’s Law – is Less WIP Faster?

Key Takeaways:

• How to apply Little’s Law to lower WIP and improve FLOW through the shop floor
• Uncover the best priority mechanism to focus on the right job at all times
• How consciously managing buffer time on your jobs improves on-time delivery

Registration is now open, so check out the IMTS 2018 website for more information. 

Meet your presenter

Mark Lilly is partner and director of sales and marketing at Synergy Resources. 

Lilly’s passion is revealing the gap between the status quo within a company, and the potential performance that could be achieved with a plan and the right software. He’s been doing it for more than 20 years for small- to medium-sized manufacturing companies, primarily by showing how software can dramatically improve their business performance. He especially likes to focus on the competitive capabilities such as delivery performance, by helping companies with the seemingly continuous struggle with shop floor scheduling.

Lilly comes from a strong family background of helping Manufacturers with production scheduling. His father created several manufacturing software applications designed to help companies with shop floor scheduling, such as Profitkey, VISUAL ERP, and LillyWorks Protected Flow Manufacturing. 

But even the best software can’t do a thing without an implementation plan that focuses on delivering the desired results. It’s all about motivating people to modify their behavior to support the actions necessary to effect the desired change. After acquiring a foundation of knowledge in computer science and psychology at Cornell 25 years ago, he’s continued to learn both the technology and people side of the equation in making significant and lasting changes in the business performance of a company.