I supported a silkscreen printmaking organization as their Industrial Engineering consultant. This single source, highly customizable, print production system supported artwork for all commercial airline customers. Prints ranged in complexity of graphic, digital composition, texture, color, and material construction.
Due to the complex nature of this process, much of the customer ordering was non-standard, which created difficulties when forecasting and level loading a production system. The production team struggled to meet vastly fluctuating targets each day and struggled to prioritize their increasing deliverable backlog.
After gathering evaluative research among the production support team there appeared to be a misrepresentation of actual process constraints and where opportunities for improvement existed.
To confront these breakdowns, I lead an effort to demystify the end-to-end ordering process by visualizing standard backoffs at each process step in a value stream mapping exercise. Kaizen bursts or improvement areas were identified with the engagement of the support team.
The current state production shop has failed to meet customer delivery schedules and is financially constraining our business. My short term plan is as follows:
1. Determine where demand is coming from? Who is demanding what and how many?
2. Establish a plan and work instructions for leveling the build schedule based on demand requirements.
3. Visualize the leveled build plan with operations teams or users working in the Silkscreen production shop.
The short term plan doesn’t alleviate the manual paper ordering process, but helps standardize current state ordering and helps gather ordering constraints. After I gather all the known constraints, the plan is to move from fire-fighting to forecasting demand and developing an electronic system that captures the process. My plan is as follows:
1. Develop a list of all customer demand requirements.
2. Document all build complexities, standardize lead times and process flows.
3. Query data history from internal databases to help establish ordering history trends per customer.
4. Standardize customer demand visibility or a standard for forecasting demand based on sales forecast.
5. Determine how to relate the forecasted trends in demand to a leveled build schedule.
6. Work with developers on creating a system and an implementation plan.