At Frazier Industrial, staying ahead of customer demand is critical. Christina Walz, Director of Strategic Production Planning explains how Frazier streamlined processes, improved planning visibility, and enhanced order fulfillment across manufacturing, sales, and engineering with the help of LMA Consulting. Watch how strategic process improvements are transforming operations and delivering greater customer value.
The team did whatever was required to ensure customer service levels were high and supported customer installations. With that said, Sales, Project Management, and Operations wanted better visibility to production schedules and order fulfillment forecasts so that they didn’t have to jump through as many hoops to attain results. Although order delivery timing was fluid based on changing customer conditions, the master planning (long-range production planning) process was the focus to load the plants successfully. Deliveries were accomplished with a huge focus on execution. Detailed scheduling, capacity planning, and labor scheduling were complex as there were multiple steps to the process (fabrication, final assembly, paint), high flexibility and variability in staffing (multiple machines, not fully staffed by machine or shift, cross-trained people moving to the latest priorities that could change hourly), high volume of order release changes (not all updated in the system), parts and orders had to be married up and prioritized through the process steps, and there were limited order backlog planning tools.
Thus, the team started by understanding the master plan and gaining control of the final assembly schedule as it drove fabrication and materials demand. As process and ERP upgrades were rolled out for final assembly, production schedules stabilized. We dug into capability and labor planning to gain a directionally correct view of work center capacity and labor availability. Therefore, potential bottlenecks were identified and addressed proactively. At this point, we focused on upgrading the use of ERP to gain enhanced functionality, exception reporting, and developed dashboards / metrics to monitor progress. Next, to provide better visibility to Operations to improve efficiencies and reduce waste, we focused on fabrication scheduling. We created a dispatch report to better stabilize schedules although a detailed schedule for each machine on an hourly basis was still lacking. Since it would require at least double the planning resources to accomplish, we went back to the drawing board, brainstormed with the team and developed an automated tool to provide a detailed plan that could be tweaked by an expert without adding resources. We also developed a SIOP (Sales Inventory Operations Planning) type packet of information so that the executive team could look ahead, reallocate production to take advantage of revenue opportunities and better optimize costs, and proactively plan for capital expenditures and material contracts.