Blog
-
Going Lean: Should You Replace Your ERP System?
By Trey Jordan, Senior Software Consultant Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) has been around for decades. You’d think, by now, the industry would have it figured out. Yet, every year, we hear news about ERP implementations that fail. For every one of these high-profile flops, there are many, many more implementations that simply fail to live…
-
The Pros and Cons of Consolidating Manufacturing ERP Systems
Managing operations through multiple manufacturing systems can be challenging, but it’s a daily reality for many manufacturers. In this post, we’ll look at the pros and cons of consolidating ERP systems – and propose an alternative. When Two Worlds Collide Whenever two or more organizations merge, they are almost always using different ERP systems.…
-
Three Ways Leaders Create Lean
Three Ways Leaders Create Lean “Relentless” leadership and team empowerment drive lean change For those of you who have heard this before, it bears repeating. For those of you who have not, this is important – leadership is the single most important component to lean success. It is exciting to talk about bottom-up change and…
-
Are Your Manufacturing Metrics Meaningless?
It seems not a week goes by when I don’t hear from someone in manufacturing: “You can’t manage what you can’t measure”. Of course, there is a lot of truth to that statement, but as someone who spends all day, every day, helping manufacturers gather real-time data for better operational performance, I believe the statement…
-
Smart Capital Investing in a Recovering Economy
Earlier this year, the MAPI Foundation increased their projection for manufacturing sector growth for 2018 – 2021 from 1.5% to 2.8%. We haven’t seen overall growth like that in a long time, and it should spell a welcome relief for many manufacturers. Capital Spending: A Leading or Lagging Indicator of Profitability? One of the metrics…
-
Fast Results Using TOC for Demand-Driven Manufacturing – Part Two
Manufacturers use constraints management first to gain the most demand-driven change Last time, we talked about focusing on enterprise improvements rather than local efficiencies using constraints management (TOC). We discussed that continuous improvement tools such as TOC, Lean and Six Sigma work like “sandpaper” on an organization’s processes, smoothing various stages of their demand-driven journey.…