Leading Manufacturer Improves Delivery Performance

With expanding business, production management grew increasingly difficult for the North American manufacturer.

Production teams were dependent on paper travelers, spreadsheets, and verbal updates for tracking work orders. Information was spread across different departments. Scattered data made it difficult for supervisors, planners, and warehouse personnel to understand what was happening on the shop floor during the day.

Material shortages added to the challenges. At times, production started before all kits were available. Such loopholes in planning resulted in avoidable delays and rescheduling. The organization faced unnecessary coordination between warehouse and manufacturing teams.

Supervisors also did not have access to a real-time view of work order progress. To identify delayed jobs or production bottlenecks, teams had to engage with multiple operators before making critical decisions.

The company was in need of a more connected mechanism to manage production while improving delivery performance and keeping pace with growing operations.

After MES implementation, the manufacturer gained higher control over day-to-day production.

Operations teams could proactively respond to issues faster, make quicker scheduling decisions, and improve communication between different functions of warehouse, planning, and manufacturing.

With better visibility into production progress as well as work orders, managers spent less time asking for updates and more time solving issues before they impacted customer deliverables.

The connected production environment also minimized dependency on manual communication, building more consistent and efficient processes in manufacturing operations.