15 Oct TME® MES Helps Leading Chair Manufacturer Save Money and Time While Improving Efficiency
One of the top chair manufacturers in the United States can sit down and relax regarding their production process thanks to a successful traceability and genealogy tracking system.
Business Situation
To handle the high volume of production, our customer needed a reliable system to track and report on the millions of the individual barcode scans captured throughout its manufacturing process. The customer’s previous electronic scanning solution could not keep track of all barcode scans. The result was an unreliable and inaccurate accounting of their production process and a loss of time to track down missing product, pieces, or wildly inaccurate inventory.
Challenge
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 to drive the production process for the day; telling operators what is being made and what pieces to pull and kit to make them. The chair manufacturer 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 and the event. The previous electronic scanning system could not keep track of all the barcode scans and would lose at least 20-40% of the scans. This resulted in wrong quantities at operation steps, difficulty debiting and controlling part inventory and consolidating the finished goods to ship, and incorrect results being sent back to Sales and Shipping. In addition, our customer 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, including knowing where it is located, how far along it is in the production process, and tracking completion of sales orders and shipping.
Solution
TME® MES (Manufacturing Execution System) by MASS Group manages the barcode scans and product tracking the chair manufacturer required. TME® MES captures a complete multi-level detailed record of the production process allowing Key Performance Indicator (KPI) tracking. TME® MES also enables realtime electronic data recall of product, process, and asset information. With TME® MES, the customer now has 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. The chair manufacturer also uses TME® MES to conduct random quality checks and track defects.
Results
With TME® MES implemented, the customer saves time and money by having greater operational efficiency and increased throughput throughout their plant. The customer 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 and their production status. The chair manufacturer also has benefited from greater worker efficiency because they are now able to immediately see individual and operation-by-operation productivity.