Optimise press impositions and eliminate waste
One of the challenges of Custom and On Demand manufacturing is the fragmentation of batches and the sheer number of options, styles and variations that drive daily volume.
The sheer quantity of these job numbers either drives batches that are not optimised for downstream finishing or are jobs which are not ideally imposed (ganged) for the product option-substrate. Materials waste and poor press utilisation results.
The goal is to create material and press time optimised batches that are the combination of 1) customer Due Date 2) product SKU 3) substrate and 4) the volume that is in pre-production WIP. The challenge is that the quantity of combinations beats people’s ability to juggle the batch sizes by SKU, time of day and day of week to optimize the batches. This means that Orders miss due dates or batches aren’t optimally imposed for the layout that means least-cost wait.
This is where workflow automation can have a big impact. Systems are ideal for juggling the myriad of inputs to make optimised decisions, multiple times per second and handle other parameters such as different week day patterns, weekends and public holidays so that batches can be optimised for those permutations. Simplistically batches can (normally) build out and grow fatter across weekends when SLA is not at risk, whereas during the week there is a time based pressure that may drive a different time-batch formation decision. Automation can totally drive this execution.
Multiply this strategy over a year and big savings are realized.
Next > People: Tracking productivity
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