With changes in consumer behavior and alternative purchasing channels to maintain competitiveness small and mid-sized manufactures need to differentiate themselves within the global marketplace based on a combination of factors such as innovation, product quality, lead-time, price and customer service.
The success of any business relies on its ability to make gaining another happy customer.
If your customer is happy, he will come back and buy again.
But how can small and mid-sized manufactures can achieve that?
In two words – Capacity Planning.
But let’s take a step back before getting into capacity planning.
These days, Customers have many options to pick from. There are many companies out there that compete with you.
Consumer behavior is changing. Customers are looking for a transparent brand and in parallel they are less patient. Thing needs to happen fast.
They want you to support them if they have a question, they want their order to arrive on time. They also require quality products with the right labeling and finally, and for the payment process to be easy and accurate.
With the increasing number of purchasing channels, manufactures are challenged with differentiating them themselves and consequently lose their competitive edge within the global marketplace.
But this is not the only challenge manufacturing are faced with today.
With increasing bill of material complexity and multi-constraint production resources such as machines, tools and labor skills, your ability to provide accurate customer delivery dates and to win those customers is getting to be a complex task.
That is because in some small and midsize manufacturers are still recording important data on paper. When a company works manually, the chance of errors increases, and those efforts can sometimes affect your ability to service your customer properly.
How can Small and Midsize Manufacturers Can Remain Competitive?
Remaining competitive and differentiating a manufacturing business can be based on a combination of factors.
- Innovation
- product quality
- lead-time
- price
- customer service
Now, let’s presume innovation, product quality, lead-time and price are constant and cannot be changed.
The manufacturer’s only option is to increase the levels of customer service. Or simply said, gain a happy customer.
For example:
- Correct engagement and timely response
- Deliver the right product on time and in the correct quantity
- Clear product identification and labeling
- Accurate invoicing and pricing
- Improving on-time customer deliveries
The starting point to improving on-time customer deliveries, with its side effect of improving cash flow, is the setting of customer expectations by providing accurate delivery dates for quotes and sales orders.
To support this business, process the sales team and production planners require the necessary tools:
- For the sales department, it would be functions such as available to promise (inventory) or capable to promise (inventory and capacity).
- While for production employees, it would be the visibility of the inventory, current planned schedule and available capacity.
All that can only happen when you have a good process for your capacity planning in your ERP or manufacturing solution.
What is Capacity Planning?
Capacity planning in simple terms is being able to schedule the right machines, people and other resources that exists in a manufacturing plant to meet the demand for products.
As product demand keep on changing, proper capacity planning solution needs to be flexible enough to keep providing the optimal number of products in minimum interruption.
Why is capacity planning important?
Having visibility to product demand is great, but the production planner requires the flexibility to make changes to the schedule.
That can happen when something changes on the factory floor. Maybe a machine stopped working or you have an unplanned tool repair.
The production manager needs to be able to simulate possible strategies or scenarios that will help him determine if there will be any negative impacts to the customer required delivery dates.
These resources need to be optimized to maximize production output, reduce changeover and setups, while meeting customer demand and that needs to happen dynamically.
Being able to analyze manufacturing processes enables manufacturers to respond proactively to problems and reduce downtime in the plant.
Being able to do all that efficiently, will translate to your ability to serve your customers better.
They will notice that change as you are able to always provide them a status on their order delivery date that is accurate. If something happens and there is a delay, you will know it upfront and therefore you can contact your customer ahead of time and explain the delay.
Being proactive and not waiting for your call will go a long way and will help you build a sustainable brand. It will set you apart from all other companies who are not doing it yet.
Beas Manufacturing Capacity Planning
With Beas Manufacturing capacity planning, initial delivery dates can be calculated via finite backward scheduling.
When this is combined with Beas Manufacturing APS, both material availability and capacity can be scheduled together to calculate the capable to promise delivery date while allows you to effectively plan large numbers of short run production orders.
This calculation takes into consideration operations that are currently running in the shop floor, and that information can be imported directly from machines via Beas’s Data Integration Hub.
