| ManEx Minute - 12 - Order Status Updates |
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November 12, 2008
Issue 12
Greetings,
We continue to gain new readers each issue. Thank you for reading, responding, and for forwarding the newsletter to others. As we increase in readers and reader contributions, the newsletter will become even more valuable.
For this issue, we will address order status updates. An important part of profitable manufacturing is effective communication between employees, departments, and customers. Ineffectual communication can increase delays, issues, and prevent companies from reaching their full potential.
According to our most recent survey, the average job is in production for seven days and requires an average of twenty minutes to gather information for a status update. Depending on the number of active jobs, and how frequently management and customers want an update, this can consume a significant amount of time each week. It doesn't have to, and this issue will show you how.
As always, we look forward to your participation and feedback as you gain new insights and become a more effective provider of Electronic Manufacturing Services.
Sincerely,
David Sharp
ManEx, Inc.
Business Case - Production
North Eastern Company* (N.E. Company) is growing. While the growth is exciting, it also creates challenges. One of the challenges is effective communication.
When NE Company started 11 years ago with 1 customer and 7 employees, each employee was involved with every project and knew all issues and the current status of each job. This made it easier to overcome issues and communicate with the customer. They were collaborative and flexible and accomplished much with a small force.
As they added employees, customers, and projects, they created reports, added triggers, and started having production meetings to try and keep management, employees, and customers updated and work through production issues and delays.
They currently have 57 active customers with an average of 2 open sales orders per customer. They have an average of 16 open Work Orders on their production floor at any given time. They have 5 buyers and 73 production employees.
This complexity creates several issues. It takes an average of 20 minutes to gather status information on any given job, makes it time consuming to update customers, and reduces the production meetings to little more than an update meetings. They don't have time to plan, prepare, and overcome.
How can N.E. Company increase communication efficiency between employees, departments, management, and customers? How can they use their system to offload some of their communication efforts? How can they increase collaboration and flexibility while maintaining quality and control?
* Company name has been changed.
Business Case Solutions
To most effectively manage excess inventory, you should purge what you can, prevent excess inventory as much as possible, and prepare for handling what you cannot prevent.
Read the full Business Case Solution
ManEx Case Solution
ManEx provides several tools to allow users to purge, prevent, and prepare for excess inventory.
Read the full ManEx Case Solution
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Please share your ideas and insights on a topic below. Use the questions to direct your response. You can submit your thoughts to mym@manex.com by clicking the topic title. Where appropriate and space permitting, we will post responses in a future newsletter so all may benefit.
How do you schedule your cycle counting?
How do you minimize impact on the floor?
How often do you cycle count?
How do you reconcile customer and internal revisions?
Do you try to make the internal revisions match the customer's revision?
Do you make an internal revision change each time the customer changes their revision regardless of the significance of the change?
Do you make an internal revision change each time the customer changes the product even if they don't update their own revision?
To suggest a new topic please send an email to mym@manex.com.
To see additional topics, please click here.
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ORDER STATUS UPDATE
"We have a formalized system for weekly reporting to each customer. The report covers more than the ManEx status. Ours includes, forecast, status through the up front processes, details on hold ups, released, committed. We do not show production progress."
-Tom, OR
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©2008 All Rights Reserved.
ManEx Minute is a weekly email distributed by ManEx, Inc.
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| Article ID: 3198 |
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