TME Helps Exemplis Build Quality Product on Time, Every Time

TME Helps Exemplis Build Quality Product on Time, Every Time

Background

A tier-one manufacturer of contract furniture for commercial, healthcare, hospitality and office markets. The organization runs a build-to-order business model, delivering high-quality, customer-designed, task, executive and conference chairs, quickly and affordably. Customers can select the size, controls, arms, fabric and quantity, and the order is delivered within 2 to 5 business days. They are headquartered in Cypress, California and ship more than 600,000 chairs annually.

Challenge

To handle the high volume of production they needed a reliable system to track and report on the millions of individual barcode scans captured throughout its manufacturing process.

Their previous electronic scanning solution could not keep track of all barcode scans and would lose at least 20 per cent of the scans. This resulted in incorrect quantities at operations steps; difficulty in consuming and managing parts inventory; difficulty in consolidating finished goods for shipping; and incorrect data being sent back to Sales and Shipping. The result was an unreliable and inaccurate accounting of their production process and a loss of time in tracking down missing products, pieces, and wildly inaccurate inventory.

In addition, the company wanted greater work-in-process (WIP) visibility and tracking of the production process. They wanted to be able to easily and quickly determine the status of a chair’s production such as knowing its location on the production line, and tracking of sales orders and shipping of completed chairs.

Solution

TME MES (formerly called FactoryServer MES) by MASS Group manages the barcode scans and product tracking the organization required. TME MES captures a complete multi-level detailed record of the production process allowing Key Performance Indicator (KPI) tracking. TME MES also enables real-time electronic data recall of product, process, and asset information.

For every individual chair ordered, a unique sales order with a unique bar code is generated. The serialized sales order is used to track the progress of a chair’s production at every step in the process. In the morning, the sales orders are pulled from the existing ERP system into TME MES to drive the production process for the day. This tells operators what is being made and what pieces to pull and kit in order to build the ordered product.

The company has over 80 operators in their manufacturing process. Each operator logs into the system by scanning their badge, which then associates them to a specific production operation for the day. Each step of the production process is scanned – the operator, the chair and the event.

With TME MES, they now have greater visibility into their plant and knows where their products are at all times. They can easily track and report on sales order completion and product shipment details. They also uses TME MES to conduct random quality checks and track defects for quality control.

Results

TME MES has helped the company achieve greater operations efficiency, increased throughput, and cost savings. The company now has a detailed record of the production process and knows instantly where every chair in production is located and its real-time status. They have realized shipping efficiency as a result of being able to quickly consolidate orders because they know where everything is on the plant floor. They no longer lose time manually looking for misplaced or incomplete chairs. They have also benefited from greater worker efficiency because they are now able to immediately see individual and operation-by-operation productivity and can assign extra personnel to handle heavy loads at the stations where they occur.

“TME MES is central to our manufacturing. We can’t operate without it.”

– Manager of Manufacturing

“The ability to customize products quickly with the industry’s highest levels of complete and on-time delivery is the cornerstone of [our company]. Our ability to deliver on this value proposition is thanks in large part to MASS Group’s TME MES. From worker productivity, and shipping accuracy and productivity, to tracking defects, TME MES is the backbone of our manufacturing process.”

– Director of Manufacturing