On-time delivery requirement was priority for every manufacturing company. Amoeba Management Founder, Kazuo Inamori said, receive order is the duties of production, while on time delivery is the responsibility of salesperson. Means that production can’t refuse any order yet the sales must be responsible for customer and demonstrate commitment to customers. However, the inventory for manufacturing from raw materials to finish goods cause high production cost. On the contrary, there will have problem of shortage which affect the production operation and can’t finish the order on schedule, resulting in procrastination of delivery order. The situation becoming progressively worse and lastly will seriously impact company’s reputation and interests.
Breakthrough-Improve the order delivery rate
On-time delivery isn’t as simple as it looks, it may reflects out a series of problems of company’s department such as sales, purchase, design, production etc. For example, the company might faces the unreasonable demand planning, materials shortage, trouble in tracking order etc. which cause delay in delivery order. What action enterprise shall take in facing the situation mention above and how to avoid those situation? First of all, we need to find out the main cause reason of the problem.
The key to the bottleneck and also the main cause reason is the lack of ability of related department. Therefore, enterprise should start from the five main aspects:
- Ability of order tracking
- Capabilities of product design
- Material supply capacity
- Manufacture capacity
- Logistics delivery performance
which can improve the order delivery rate.
1. Ability of order tracking
An enterprise having a weak order answering ability is owing to a limited quotation estimation, capacity estimation, and technical estimation ability, therefore the order evaluation ability shuddering. Moreover, if the order evaluation cycle is too long, it will increase the order confirmation cycle.
In a nutshell, companies should develop a parallelized order evaluation process to shorten the evaluation cycle, which a continuous quotation follow-up process may improve the order delivery rate and an accurate estimate of the quotation simulation to increase the profitability of orders.
2. Capabilities of product design
If enterprise having a weak replication capability, it is because of product graphics and design technology cannot be shared. When unshared components coupled with inadequate product development project control, it will result in insufficient new product development capabilities. Moreover, if enterprise unable to control changes of standard product is owing to a poor product technical information transmission, this situation coupled with the long production cycle of trial production and proofing, it will result in design and production cannot be docked.
In this regard, companies should adopt standardized warehouse categories to improve product development efficiency, an integrated product data and design tools may improve the efficiency of productivity conversion, and a transparent change execution system can avoid losses due to changes.
3. Material supply capacity
Enterprise lack of stocking ability for example raw material, semi-finished goods/raw part, it will affect accuracy of prepared materials. Enterprise unable to make accurate assessments of suppliers, procurement cannot be reached, supplier abnormal supply let enterprise have to face on-time delivery problem. Therefore, there are some method to improve supply capacity, by implement the collaborative supply chain management, to improve operation efficiency; follow up purchase status repeatedly, to improve on-time delivery. Create a flexible relationship with supplier for solve the problem.
4. Manufacture capacity
The reasons of affect manufacturing process such as machinery operation, machine tools, whether the raw materials are sufficient, production line start on time, quality issue, if material over usage immediate supply problem. Thus, to improve production on time completion ability, material usage control, enterprise should execute production plan for tracking production status and product submission ability; production line become intelligent to reduce shutdown issue; have a clear resource consumption, to improve input-output ratio.
5. Logistics delivery performance
The last section for on time delivery of products, the transportation ability for enterprise is very significant. Through instant completion process, enterprise can avoid issues including improper connection of production and shipping and lack of transportation ability causes unable to do replacement to customer immediately. The instant completion process can improve prepare /delivery respond quickly, provide customer a better service according to customer information and resource.
Set up “Monitoring Index” to improve Enterprise Early Warning Mechanism
How information technology tools help in manufacturing industry forging five management ability to improve sales order’s delivery on-time? What information should be capture and monitor by enterprise in order to ensure customers’ order can be deliver on-time? After information has been monitored, how to establish emergency handling mechanism? How to make problems or phenomena become controllable, detectable or even have early warning to the enterprise? When the problems or phenomena have been discovered, how to use an effective mechanism to eliminate problem or reduce the damage to enterprise? These are the issues facing by manufacturing industry when they want to increase their delivery capabilities.
How to resolve these issues? Enterprise need to have excellent deliver capabilities management. A “Monitoring Index” need to establish for enterprise: based on the “order on-time delivery monitoring platform”, “order delivery intelligent evaluation system”, “raw material monitoring platform” and the collaborative mechanism between purchasing and manufacturing. The most important thing is that all departments cooperate with each other to enhance enterprise’s ability to predict the capabilities of delivery date, production plan and inventory management. In the end, every sales order can be delivered on-time.
