Introduction to Lean Manufacturing
Lean Manufacturing Features
The Lean Manufacturing module provides a suite of tools that support both lean manufacturing and flow scheduling practices for production, replenishment, and inventory.
Today, many customers are re-examining their manufacturing philosophies and practices in response to factors such as increasingly uncertain demand, more complex variations in product mix, and growing variability in customer ordering patterns. As a result, many companies are moving toward a more streamlined manufacturing approach and implementing continuous flow and pull techniques to make their plants and entire value stream more effective.
QAD manufacturing functionality has always excelled at supporting mixed-mode manufacturing of discrete work orders and repetitive schedules, either separately or together. For information on these features, see User Guide: QAD Manufacturing.
QAD solutions have evolved with the needs of the manufacturing industry to support lean, just-in-time environments. This volume includes detailed information on how to set up and use two of those solutions:
• The Flow Scheduling module lets you create and manage the life cycle of time-phased production schedules for use in a flow-driven, lean manufacturing environment. Optionally, you can link flow scheduled orders with existing demand orders and work orders.
Flow Scheduling includes detailed information on setting up and using Flow Scheduling.
• The Kanban module lets you tightly manage the amount of inventory within the value stream based on pull-replenishment principles. Features include multiple methods for calculating and setting supermarket quantities based on either manual data entry or system calculations that include various flexible, user-defined parameters. You can also examine what-if scenarios for supermarket sizing in a workbench before updating the system as well as analyze how well the supermarket is handling actual historical demand. Kanban loops can be established and levels visibly communicated throughout the supply chain.
Kanban includes detailed information on setting up and using the Kanban module.
Additional QAD products are available to support Lean Manufacturing needs:
• QAD Supply Chain Portal (QAD SCP) is an inventory visibility tool provided on a hosted Internet site. SCP allows customers and their authorized suppliers to share information about inventory, scheduling, purchase orders, shipments, kanbans, invoices, bills of material, and so on. As part of the QAD SCP feature set, a small puller is installed to display kanban information to the supplier through a browser. Customers do not need to modify the existing corporate firewall. If it is possible to browse the Internet from within the company, it is possible to use QAD SCP with kanban functionality.
For information on QAD Supply Chain Portal, see the QAD Web site.
• QAD JIT Sequencing (JIT/S) helps you schedule and manage operations at plants that produce, package, and/or ship configured parts and assemblies, in sequence. JIT/S ensures that the right items are delivered to the customer’s production lines at the right time and in the correct sequence. User Guide: QAD JIT Sequencing describes this product in detail.