Lean Manufacturing solutions
Lean manufacturing can improve operational performance by lowering manufacturing costs, increasing on-time delivery, improving quality and customer service, and generating new sources of value. Businesses that want to take advantage of lean manufacturing, however, often struggle to move from a push-based forecast model to a pull-based model based on actual customer demand.
Technology solutions from Microsoft and its partners help you energize, transform, and sustain your lean initiatives and practices. These solutions upgrade paper-based functions—such as Kanban and value stream mapping—and improve product development and wider manufacturing information systems. By effectively managing your lean manufacturing process, your people can drive efficient success by reducing waste, inventory, and cycle times, while increasing quality, revenue, and profit margins.
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Business challenge
Obstacles to lean manufacturing include the use of manual, paper-based tools, restricted data sharing among applications, inflexible computing technologies, and difficulty accessing data. Disparate, non-integrated point solutions also present roadblocks to effectively scaling lean manufacturing enterprise-wide.
Without established value stream mapping and analysis (VSM&A) tools, your people don't have access to a systematic way of conducting accurate and timely value stream analysis. They lack the ability to create a VSM&A system of record, they have limited visibility into value stream improvement opportunities, and they may not have the data integrity necessary to make confident decisions. This leads to excessive time spent collecting and validating data rather than to more valuable time spent analyzing data to uncover improvement opportunities.
Manual Kanban systems pose their own challenges: inaccurate inventory data, lack of a cohesive system for handling materials replacement, no ability to track performance data, lack of flexibility in response to customer demand, inventory stockouts, lost Kanban cards, and no integration with enterprise business systems.
The lack of a value stream performance management system means that your people have no enterprise-level analysis capability or visibility into enterprise value streams, no ability to view actual versus projected results, and limited collaboration and knowledge-sharing capability.
The Microsoft strategy for lean manufacturing addresses these issues through three key solution areas: value stream mapping, collaborative electronic Kanban, and a lean enterprise portal.
Solutions
The Microsoft strategy for lean manufacturing is to help you energize, transform, and sustain your lean operations. Along with its partners, Microsoft energizes your people by giving them breakthrough practitioner tools that help them master the basics. The solutions they provide also help institutionalize corporate continuous improvement initiatives by matching your people and processes with visual management, business intelligence, and collaboration tools that standardize how companies analyze, measure, monitor, and improve value streams. With people-ready software tools that help your workers master the basics and that provide management with a value stream performance management system, you'll be able to sustain lean operations—even if you experience executive and employee turnover.
Microsoft and its partners deliver highly customizable technologies that empower your people to amplify the impact of solutions to support lean manufacturing efforts in the following three areas:
| • | Value stream mapping: Value stream mapping and analysis is a critical tool that searches for opportunities to eliminate waste and to make processes more efficient. VSM&A solutions from Microsoft and its partners improve visibility into value stream improvement opportunities and empower you to create a lean system of record. |
| • | Lean enterprise portal: A lean enterprise portal provides visual management, business intelligence, document management, and collaboration capabilities to give your people a standard way of work that they can easily adopt and even extend to suppliers and customers. |
| • | Collaborative electronic Kanban: Collaborative eKanban aligns inventory and production with demand, resulting in the ability to reduce inventory, eliminate stockouts and expediting charges, increase buyer and planner productivity, and improve on-time delivery percentages. |
Case studies
Read these case studies to learn how Microsoft lean manufacturing solutions have helped companies.
Commercial Vehicle Group
Commercial Vehicle Group (CVG) is a world leader in vehicle solutions for the construction, agricultural, industrial, commercial, municipal, and marine industries. To help improve on-time delivery, reduce inventory levels, and lower costs, CVG engaged Microsoft partner Ultriva. Ultriva deployed an electronic Kanban solution built using Microsoft technologies and the Ultriva Electronic Kanban application. As a result, CVG reduced its inventory by 43 percent, boosted inventory turns by 28 percent, increased customer on-time delivery, accelerated productivity, and improved synergy with partners.
Business benefits
By implementing solutions from Microsoft and its partners, your people can realize the following benefits:
| • | Complete visibility across the supply chain
eKanban provides real-time material visibility, unparalleled supplier communication, replenishment driven by actual demand rather than forecasts, and closed-loop replenishment signals. |
| • | Standardized value stream mapping and analysis
VSM&A solutions from Microsoft and its partners systematically evaluate and report on value stream performance, improve visibility and reporting into value stream opportunities and projects, improve productivity and collaboration across groups, and capture and report on your lean program savings. |
| • | Elimination of stockouts and inventory reduction
Reduce inventory by 20 to 75 percent, and eliminate stockouts and expediting charges. These benefits result in a reduction of cycle times and improved customer delivery performance, as well as increased productivity for buyers and planners. eKanban solutions streamline production, which can drive down inventory costs as much as 75 percent. |
| • | Sustained lean initiatives
By implementing lean enterprise portal solutions from Microsoft and its partners, you empower your lean practitioners to improve cross-team collaboration, enhance project tracking, gain visibility into project ideas, memorialize lean techniques, and integrate lean manufacturing design, analysis, and improvements into existing business systems and processes. Enabling your lean practitioners across the enterprise to work together aids you in adopting lean, flexible operational networks and business processes that can change as business needs evolve. |
Overview
Technologies
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