An expert in the field of IT consulting and automation of accounting at furniture enterprises gives recommendations on attracting a hired production director and calculating motivational schemes.
Sergey Mironenko, CEO of Aviant company
Many of my clients complain that they often have to change production directors. I don’t need to tell you how troublesome and energy-consuming this is! What is the reason why this happens? Maybe the lack of competent managers in the market is having an effect? Or is Russian business too young for this? Or maybe it’s a matter of inflated expectations, an incorrect assessment of what and how a top manager in this position should be able to do? Or is there a lack of understanding of how to manage production, and both at once - the hired top manager and his employer?
I think all this has an effect - to one degree or another. But, perhaps, the most important thing that hinders the success of the production director and leads to leapfrog with the change of top managers is the lack of understanding of how to manage such a director. I offer readers of “Furniture Business” a simple technique: how to start growing it yourself or attract a smart hired production director.
First, let's describe in more detail the production process at a furniture factory. It all starts with a basic calculation of the planned cost of production and an assessment of current capacities. Only after we understand how much and for how much we are able to produce can we decide on the type of production we will follow: serial or custom. It happens, however, that one director manages two directions at once.
Next, we need to decide what production planning methods we will use. There are many possibilities here, but ultimately they depend on the specifications of the particular finished product. In furniture production, the concept of “packaging” is often used, and each package has its own specification; the finished product itself appears after final assembly at the client’s site.
Once we have prescribed the process for manufacturing “packages” and their specifications, we can determine the planning horizons. The most commonly used methods are shift planning and general workshop planning for the month.
At the moment when you decide to plan your production, try to be guided by the required level of accounting detail within the production cycle. The following is important here: the lower the level of detail required, the higher the labor costs for accounting for such production. You also need to be aware of why you actually need this detail. The task is simplified if you use robotic lines - they can be integrated into any accounting system and take into account information without additional labor costs.
Now all that remains is to highlight the costs that will relate directly to production. To do this, it is better to create a separate table and try to take into account everything that is directly or indirectly related to production. And here - attention! — it is important to understand exactly what costs will be included in the production cycle. Why? Because this will limit the scope of our production and show where the director’s responsibility actually ends, what exactly he is responsible for.
Finally, having in hand planning methods, a scheme for calculating the cost of manufacturing products, a list of cost items, calculations of production capacity, a decision on the level of accounting detail, you can create motivation for the production director. Yes, precisely to create motivation, and not to open an intensive and chaotic screening of candidates for this position.
Motivation is the only effective mechanism that will allow you to manage your top manager and achieve your goals. Motivation must be consistent with the development strategy of your enterprise and the business strategy as a whole. Many businessmen do not make logical connections between strategy and staff motivation, and then wonder: why do seemingly qualified top managers not show the required results? Pay attention to this: see to what extent the motivational scheme for your top manager corresponds to the business strategy you have outlined.
Based on my experience, I identify two basic types of strategies that are present on the market: a strategy for development and expansion of market presence; strategy for maintaining a business or its survival. The first is characterized by the fact that the emphasis is on investment costs and competent management of financial resources. The second, an anti-crisis survival strategy, is more focused on managing key costs and reducing them. In one phase or another of business development, these strategies replace each other. Moreover, each of them requires a change in motivational schemes that support top managers’ desire to achieve goals within the framework of these strategies.
To determine a clear motivation for a top manager, it is worth first of all formulating the key indicators of his performance. In other words, indicators of success in the part of the business that you delegate to him. It is important to clearly indicate to the manager his area of responsibility. A top manager must understand where the field is located in which he will make decisions. Also, the top manager must see the relationship between the mistakes he can make and his personal results.
Everyone understands that a real top manager is an ambitious person. He is able to set goals on his own. And therefore, in the motivational scheme he should be given such an opportunity.
How to establish a trusting relationship between the owner and the production director? Accounting automation systems will help with this, making reporting on the director’s performance indicators more transparent and understandable. Moreover, the presence of a unified automated accounting system links the performance of the production director even more tightly with the performance of other participants in the business process.
What are these indicators? Among the main ones, we can highlight the planned and actual cost of production, the amount of defects in manufactured products, the completeness and uniformity of the load on production facilities, the time to manufacture a unit of product, and the growth of production volumes. These are the indicators that should be included in the motivation calculation scheme for your production director. A director you can manage effectively. And he, in turn, will stay in your factory longer than the previous ones, and will be able to achieve much greater success in managing the production process.
1C-Rarus is a joint venture between 1C and Rarus, which has existed for seven years and is one of the leading companies in the development of ready-made industry solutions in the field of business automation on the 1C:Enterprise platform. Today the 1C-Rarus company presents a new solution for the effective management of a modern furniture enterprise.
Without exaggeration, we can say that modern computer technologies have occupied an important place in the field of production. Indeed, more and more manufacturers are coming to the conclusion that automation can significantly improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the enterprise.
However, most software products on the market for manufacturing enterprises, as a rule, solve either local problems: accounting, trade, warehouse operations, or do not have a clearly defined industry specialization. This problem is also relevant for furniture companies.
In November 2001, at the international exhibition Furniture 2001, the 1C-Rarus company presented a software product that comprehensively implemented the production, trading, warehouse and financial functions of a typical furniture enterprise. At the same time, the program is designed in such a way that it is convenient to work with geographically remote divisions of the enterprise.
This solution is intended for maintaining management accounting in production, both standard furniture and furniture manufactured to individual orders. The program can also be useful for furniture showrooms.
Below is a brief description of the main functions of the program:
Order and sales management
For a consumer-oriented furniture company, an important element of management accounting is the management of customer orders.
To work with clients, the program provides an unlimited number of price categories and pricing mechanisms that the user can use at his own discretion. When placing an order, you can specify both regular information about the order (contents, customer name, address) and additional information, for example, delivery time. When creating an order, you can include both products from the catalog and “create” products based on a prototype (one of the products already present in the catalog).
A useful feature when working with customers is the entry and storage of product photos. Thanks to this, the program can be conveniently used in sales departments or furniture showrooms, selecting the furniture the buyer needs by color, size, appearance, material and coating.
Upon receipt of an order for the shipment of furniture, you can receive a prompt calculation of the cost of the order, taking into account deviations from the prototype and additional services for the delivery of furniture, its assembly, etc.
For the convenience of working with orders, the program allows you to keep track of the geometric parameters of the item, for example: height, width, length, type of facade.
The program allows you to trace the entire chain of documents created based on the entered customer order. By drawing up an operational report on balances and turnover for a specific order, you can find out the status of order fulfillment at any time.
Materials management
A distinctive feature of furniture production is the presence of a large range of materials, raw materials, semi-finished products, finished products, and goods. Each element of the nomenclature has various properties: weight, dimensions, material, color, coating, etc. This and other data is stored by the program in the multi-level “Nomenclature” directory.
In connection with the “Nomenclature” directory, you can enter an arbitrary number of product specifications and semi-finished products indicating the main specification. The specification stores data on the material composition of the manufactured product, production operations for its manufacture, by-products, analogues of materials and semi-finished products with a replacement priority scheme.
The program assumes full automation of warehouse accounting and movement of material assets: receipt to warehouses, movement between warehouses and to production, write-off, batch accounting, inventory taking, reserving goods in the warehouse, etc.
Manufacturing control
Based on orders received from customers and other system parameters, the program generates a furniture production plan. Planning is carried out for a certain period for specific projects (types of activity, groups of orders), in the context of divisions and product range.
Based on the furniture production plan, the planned cost of production is calculated, a procurement plan for raw materials and materials is drawn up, production tasks and orders are formed by suppliers.
Entering a production task for final products automatically generates tasks for workshops, areas, employees for processing raw materials, assembling components, cutting into materials and other operations necessary for the production of furniture.
Production accounting in the program is carried out by the formation of primary documentation: production tasks and work orders, invoices, documents for production, etc.
The capabilities of production accounting are complemented by technological maps, which store data on the composition of the manufactured product or semi-finished product (staples, nails, boards, upholstery), consumption rates of materials and semi-finished products, production operations, by-products and analogues of materials and semi-finished products that are used in the production of the product.
Cost management
The program allows you to keep records for different types of production. Accounting for the cost of manufactured furniture is possible both according to actual and standard costs. In this case, standard costs are indicated directly in the technological maps.
The cost of direct costs can be calculated directly at the time of production or at the close of the period. General and production costs are written off in accordance with the selected method when closing the period, and various cost distribution bases can be used. Records of work in progress are also kept by divisions, orders, production assignments and items. The program supports accounting for defects and returns from production.
Management of mutual settlements and funds
The program allows you to automate work with clients: issuing invoices, invoices, invoices and other primary documents. To record purchases of raw materials, materials and goods from suppliers, registration of receipt of goods at warehouses, returns of goods to the supplier, registration of invoices and entry of orders to suppliers is provided. At any time, you can get details of mutual settlements with counterparties by currency, by agreement, by basis documents.
The program allows you to generate and process primary banking and cash documents: payment orders, bank statements and cash orders. Conducting bank and cash desk operations allows you to quickly monitor the movement of funds of the enterprise.
Management reporting
The program has extensive capabilities for obtaining a variety of management reports, allowing managers of a furniture company to have up-to-date management information at their disposal at any time. For example, you can generate reports on what is happening in production, on the balances of funds and materials, the status of mutual settlements with counterparties, the volume of production, the execution of the production plan, the volume of work in progress and defects, the volume of sales and purchases, the cost of production, changes in assets and liabilities of the enterprise, etc. Such reports can be detailed by company divisions, firms, and other analytics elements.
Compatibility
Automatic upload of data into the standard “Accounting” configuration of the 1C:Enterprise program allows for integration of the 1C-Rarus: Furniture Enterprise program with accounting. This is very convenient, since the 1C company constantly keeps up to date the compliance of the Accounting configuration with the requirements and changes of Russian legislation.
The functionality of the 1C-Rarus: Furniture Enterprise program can be expanded with other management solutions of the 1C-Rarus company:
There is also a connection between the solution and the furniture design program “K3-Furniture”.
Thus, the “1C-Rarus: Furniture Enterprise” program has full capabilities for organizing management accounting, is flexibly configured and scalable, has pronounced industry specifics and covers almost all production and commercial functions of a furniture industry enterprise with the accounting process. More detailed information on this decision can be obtained by calling: 250-6383/93.
Archival material
Furniture factory "Ronikon" (Moscow), created in2000, initially engaged in the production of custom-made wardrobes. Currently, the factory has significantly expanded production and today, along with custom-made furniture, offers a large assortment of serial cabinet furniture - sliding wardrobes, hinged wardrobes, hallways, bedrooms, libraries, shelving, etc. The factory's products are sold through a developed network of branded stores and branches located in large cities of Russia - St. Petersburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Samara, Volgograd, Krasnoyarsk, Novosibirsk, Krasnodar, Tula, etc. The company employs more than 2,000 people.
Need for automation
The growth of production, combined with the development of a network of branches, led to the use of an effective production management system and numerous divisions. The information system that existed at the enterprise at that time consisted of approximately ten separate software products. Over time, it became clear that this system did not allow for a quick and objective response to the processes taking place in the company, and also did not cope with reflecting all the changes associated with business expansion.
Data exchange between departments was not organized effectively. Units received information untimely, and this made it difficult to analyze the existing situation. It took so much time to collect the necessary data that much of it became irrelevant during the collection process. It was difficult for management to track the stages of fulfillment of certain orders; work centers and personnel were unevenly loaded.
To organize full control over the production process and effective cost planning, as well as to solve other problems, the enterprise needed a modern information system.
The factory management presented a number of requirements for the new automated system. First of all, its functionality should have allowed the automation of enterprise business processes, taking into account industry specifics. To support the growth and development of the enterprise, the information system had to be scalable. It was also necessary for the system to promptly display all changes in Russian legislation.
Work on the design and implementation of the information system was entrusted to the company "Aviant" (1C: Franchisee, Moscow), which, according to customer reviews, has the necessary experience in automating production and trading companies.
The new information system for the furniture factory was created on the basis of the standard application solution “1C:Manufacturing Enterprise Management 8” on the “1C:Enterprise 8” platform. This software product, in the opinion of the factory management, best met the stated requirements for an automated system.
Project work
At the preparatory stage, Aviant specialists carried out a comprehensive diagnosis and analysis of business processes, on the basis of which a scheme for their optimization was then drawn up. In twenty days, a prototype of the system was created and fully implemented, and a test example was implemented using customer data. All business processes of the furniture factory were regulated and subject to automation within the framework of this project.
The implementation took place in several stages. First of all, the full production cycle of furniture products was automated, starting from taking measurements and designing the appearance and ending with installation of the finished product at the buyer. To give the production process the necessary transparency, it was divided into a sequence of stages in the system that are easily tracked. Accounting for direct and indirect costs in the manufacture of products was also set up. Thanks to this, it became possible to accurately calculate the final cost of production, which made it possible to formulate a flexible pricing policy.
At the second stage, the work of the materials warehouse, procurement service, administration, planning and economic department and design and technology bureau was automated. Decision making and interaction between departments have become more efficient and consistent. The factory now has the opportunity to plan production based on sales plans. In addition, the system implemented the possibility of dispatch, which made it possible to ensure uniform loading of all parts of the furniture factory, as well as continuous, rhythmic and economical execution of all processes of the production cycle. This helped prevent equipment downtime and lost working time and, accordingly, fulfill orders on time.
At the third stage, a number of specific mechanisms were implemented in the system. This is, for example, the “Service Management” subsystem, designed to account for and control the provision of services for measurement, development of a product design project, delivery and installation of the finished product. There is also the ability to control funds and their optimal use with customizable routing of tasks by role.
In addition, the system implements a special “Technologist Monitor” tool. For each customer order, the monitor displays data on the needs for materials necessary for its execution, and also automatically controls the availability of the required raw materials in the warehouse. As a result of using the Technologist Monitor, the accuracy of calculations has significantly increased and the coordination of costs has been simplified, optimal workload of work centers and personnel has been ensured, and control over all stages of order fulfillment has been implemented in real time.
Thanks to the creation of special cutting cards, which display the remaining materials and offer optimal options for their use, there has been a reduction in waste in the production of products.
Automation result
As a result of the project, 200 jobs were automated at the factory. The new information system covers main and auxiliary business processes and is effectively used to solve problems of comprehensive planning, analysis and control of activities. Automation has led to a reduction in the number of routine operations and increased efficiency in record keeping. Management received a fully functional management tool that allows them to quickly make decisions based on detailed and up-to-date information.
The implementation of the system contributed to a significant reduction in management costs and expansion of the range of products produced by the Ronikon furniture factory. Combined with a more flexible pricing policy, this led to an increase in demand for products and, accordingly, to an increase in the company's profits.
Currently, having gone through the stages of industrial launch and warranty support, all divisions of the Ronikon furniture factory are engaged in operational activities in the new information system.
Sergey Babichev
System analyst, Furniture Design direction, Top Systems company.
Sergey Dimitryuk
System analyst, Technological Processes direction, Top Systems company.
The advantages of automating the end-to-end chain of production processes have already been repeatedly discussed both in periodicals and on specialized Internet resources. However, the challenges facing automation are being discussed with even greater interest. Some opinions of skeptics are fair and the problems they raise deserve attention, but we must not forget that technical and technological barriers are sooner or later overcome, and the trends are such that without ensuring transparency and controllability of the operational and production processes of an enterprise in modern conditions, it becomes more difficult to compete. Therefore, enterprise-wide automation is the norm today. Confirmation of this is the increasing number of requests received by the Top Systems company from representatives of furniture companies who are searching for modern integrated solutions for their enterprises and reliable suppliers for their implementation.
The market for integrated automated solutions includes offers from both domestic and foreign software developers. Unfortunately, the similarity of the declared functionality between different systems turns out to be imaginary in reality (and this is one of the main reasons for skepticism!). Everyone knows that the concept of “car” cannot be interpreted unambiguously when talking about its capabilities. At a minimum, it is necessary to clarify its make, technical characteristics and, ultimately, the class of the car.
So why should “document flow”, “parameterization” and other capacious terms that characterize the key capabilities of automated systems be interpreted differently?
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This article outlines the basic requirements for automated systems, which, according to the authors, are capable of ensuring the collective work of key departments of a furniture enterprise.
The main requirements of customers facing the choice of a comprehensive solution boil down to the following points:
- ensuring collective work in a common information space (UIS);
- using the principle of a single source of data (without duplicating data) in the interaction of all divisions in the Unified IP;
- the ability to use the complex within distributed production facilities with data transmission via secure VPN channels;
- building an end-to-end process automation chain with a minimum number of breaks (ideally, no chain breaks at all);
- flexibility of the system both due to the ability to configure it using built-in tools (that is, without programming), and through the use of macros (ideally, system support by one or two administrators without special programming knowledge).
- “seamless” integration of the complex components, which ultimately affects the cost of maintaining the complex solution when migrating to new versions of programs.
The stages of the life cycle of a furniture product differ slightly for serial and custom production, but invariably include the following stages:
1. Order.
2. Preparation for production.
3. Manufacturing.
4. Delivery and service.
For production operating on a made-to-order basis, the stages are performed sequentially, while in mass production conditions it is necessary to continuously develop and update the product line.
To achieve this, various marketing activities are carried out: market research and purchasing power, collecting feedback from customers, etc. Based on the results of marketing research, an experimental sample of the product is designed and manufactured, which is then either sent for revision or put into production.
Despite the differences in the cycle, depending on the type of production, approximately the same mechanisms and tools are used to automate stages 1-4. Let's consider the main functionality of the complex components used to build an end-to-end process automation chain for a furniture enterprise.
Order
Information about the order, as a rule, comes from sales showrooms, where the product is demonstrated to the client and a contract is concluded. For these purposes, automation systems for the activities of sales salons are used. Such systems allow you to model an interior in three dimensions based on client data, automatically generate contractual documentation and transfer order parameters to production, where the received data is processed and transferred to various ERP (enterprise resource planning) class accounting systems.
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| Example of design documentation |
In the case of a serial system, a production task is formed based on order data, and in the case of a custom system, the order parameters are transferred to the design department for development.
To carry out marketing activities aimed at developing new products, it is necessary to be able to collect, accumulate and structure information on future products. For these purposes, the technical document management (TDM) functionality is used, which allows you to add and accumulate heterogeneous files and data (documents, images, videos, etc.) in the system, structure them and provide access to data in accordance with enterprise security policies. To work with clients, CRM (customer relationship management) class systems are used, where information about contacts, commercial offers, invoices, etc. is stored. To work with contractors, organize internal orders and register incoming and outgoing correspondence, the functionality of office and clerical document flow is used.
We should not forget about the system-wide components necessary to provide the UIS, which are used by all participants in the production cycle in their daily activities:
- postal service for notifications and exchange of information, as well as for issuing tasks and instructions;
- calendar;
- work with the range of products and materials;
- automatic generation of reports and statements;
- data search and filtering system.
Pre-production
This stage is associated with design and technological preparation of production (DTPP), at which the design and development of design documentation (CD) is carried out, technological preparation is carried out and control programs are generated for equipment with numerical control (CNC).
For furniture based on individual projects (non-standard furniture), the key capabilities of the design system are:
- creation of geometry of any complexity (the possibility directly depends on the geometric core of the system);
- developed design diagnostic tools to minimize design errors;
- automated tools for constructing products and obtaining design documentation (handling such concepts as parts, edges, fittings) facilitate the process of product development, and automatic receipt of design documentation eliminates routine operations);
- tools for working with the product (working with materials of parts and products, cost calculation, etc.);
- the possibility of using prototypes, that is, pre-prepared parametric blanks of parts and assembly units for repeated use with different parameters;
- Some design systems provide automatic generation of export files for CNC equipment, which allows them to be transferred to the machine and processed.
For the design of serial and custom (standard) furniture, the key capabilities of the system are: - powerful parametric capabilities, which allows you to implement any logic for rebuilding models;
- the ability to create custom dialogs to control models without programming;
- the ability to use a three-dimensional model of a product to automatically obtain assembly diagrams (product data sheets), package calculations and other necessary documentation.
Technological preparation of production provides the opportunity to: - select the processing route and the composition of operations according to the type of furniture parts;
- select basic and alternative equipment;
- calculate modes and time standards for processing;
- create a parametric technical process depending on the available equipment and production capabilities;
- formulate basic production operations and transmit their parameters for dispatching operations and drawing up production plans.
The process of developing design and technological documentation must be manageable, and approval procedures must be transparent and effective.
For these purposes, project management, resource and cost planning mechanisms (Project Management) are used. It is important that the information for analysis in the Project Management system is based on real data. This will allow you to identify bottlenecks during the project (for example, reasons for postponing the launch of a product into production), rationally distribute resources for project implementation, or compare several copies of the project in real time in the “plan-to-fact” mode.
In approval procedures at the stages of the CTPP, the functionality of business processes (for example, for working with notices of changes in project documentation) and the mechanism for generating reports (specifications, statements, etc.) are widely used.
In the process of designing and manufacturing experimental samples, a search for design solutions is carried out, issues of optimizing the cost of products are resolved, and the use of certain materials for the production of a product is worked out. In this way, several versions of design and technological documentation are generated for each product design.
Therefore, the ability to manage product compositions, versions and configurations (options) is an important requirement for a technical document management system.
Manufacturing
At the stage of order implementation, it is important to receive information about the state of affairs in production in real time and in case of problems (for example, equipment breakdown) to assess the current situation and promptly make adjustments to the production plan. To solve these problems, an operational scheduling system (OCP) is used.
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| Order schedule |
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The main functionality at this stage is the following subsystems:
- Production task management. Operational scheduling (OCP);
- Warehouse accounting (Warehouse);
- Maintenance and repair of equipment (TORO);
Delivery and service
The final stage of the product life cycle is delivery of the order to the customer and after-sales service. At this stage, the relationship between the client and the seller moves into the category of formal requests/responses in the form of claims, requests for product repairs, fulfillment of warranty obligations, etc. The same functionality is used here as in the previous stages:
- office and clerical document flow;
- technical document management;
- customer relationship management;
- project and resource management.
At this stage, it is important to have information about the design of the parts supplied to the furniture client and their color scheme, in order to quickly manufacture broken parts during the delivery, assembly or operation of the products.
For some types of fittings, such as glue-in fittings, it is necessary to provide instructions for replacing fittings or repair inserts.
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To solve the problems of complex automation of enterprises, the Top Systems company offers a single complex T-FLEX PLM+, which meets the most modern requirements of PLM class systems (product life cycle management).
The T-FLEX PLM+ complex includes the T-FLEX Furniture three-dimensional design system, consisting of three editions:
- T-FLEX Mebel.Salon - a solution for automating the activities of sales salons;
- T-FLEX Furniture.Constructor - an environment for quickly designing furniture based on individual projects;
- T-FLEX Furniture.Administrator is a universal environment for developing parametric furniture models without programming.
More detailed information about the T-FLEX PLM+ complex and its components can be found on the company’s website: www.tflex.ru.
From the point of view of generally accepted terminology, logistics is the management of material and information flows in the process of business activities of an organization. The goal of logistics organization and production management is to optimize internal flows and solve the following range of problems:
. Production planning based on customer orders
. Operational monitoring of production processes
. Inventory level control,
. accounting for the quality of products
. Manage production schedule and process order
. Analysis and control of the cost of finished products
Let's take a closer look at some of the tasks.
The main initial data for planning production activities are: a register of customer orders, information on technological processes and operational time parameters, information on the design composition of assembly products, as well as analytical data on the current load of production resources. When performing production planning procedures, logistics rules provide for minimizing the following losses: technological downtime of equipment and suboptimal use of labor resources. This means that each technological process for parts/workpieces can be described as a sequence of production operations with its own time parameters. Moreover, the time parameters can be both operational and preparatory (setting up equipment, moving workpieces at work sites). In practice, significant time resources are spent on the preparatory parameters of technological processes. This is due to the fact that the products on which production operations are performed have different design characteristics. As a result, if you draw up a time diagram of the sequence of products passing through workplaces according to descriptions of technological processes, a fairly large number of downtime and “phantom” losses of total time arise due to the fact that some workplaces are forced to wait for the completion of an operation at previous stages of production routes. Or the set of production orders for the workplace has an unbalanced appearance, which leads to frequent readjustments of equipment according to the design parameters of the products being processed.
The optimal solution to the production planning procedure is the use of specialized software systems, which include furniture production automation system "ITM". This system implements various algorithms that, based on initial data, evaluate the fulfillment of customer orders in terms of available production resources and generate a production schedule based on the criteria for minimizing unnecessary downtime of jobs and equipment. Moreover, the optimization criteria used are individual for each type of worker places (cutting, edgebanding, milling, painting work).
Let's take a practical example: the current production volume is 5,000 parts per month. The application of logistics rules to workplaces performing edge banding operations made it possible to reduce the inappropriate use of working time by 40% due to the formation of a set of production orders with optimization of technological parameters (edge type, workpiece size). As a result of reducing the time spent on equipment changeover, the monthly volume of parts increased to 7,000 units. This made it possible to eliminate the bottleneck in the overall production process and eliminated the need to purchase additional equipment and expand the workshop area.
Operational monitoring of production processes must first of all ensure the collection of information necessary to control the order and timing of orders. In addition, in order to use certain logistics rules, information about the actual time parameters of technological processes and the number of products based on production output is extremely important. Moreover, the information must be sufficiently relevant and updated in the data warehouse in real production time. The most widely used implementation of operational monitoring is based on barcoding technology.
Almost any object in production can be assigned a unique barcode. It can be used not only for production documents, materials and products (workpieces, parts, fronts, kits and packaging), but also for operations, workplaces and employees. Reading barcodes of objects and production documents using special devices allows you to register the actual start and end times of technological process operations, as well as generate information and control influences for other participants in the production process.
All information about the state of production facilities, obtained as a result of reading barcodes, enters a single data warehouse and is, in its structure, the basis for constructing statistical reporting and analyzing the work of production departments, in order to minimize downtime of workplaces and increase equipment throughput.
Let's consider a practical example: a comparative analysis of the planned and actual production load showed a high level of actual downtime of jobs associated with the performance of facade milling operations. It turned out that the standards for calculating labor costs drawn up by the technologist did not take into account the time for model-by-model sorting of facades before performing operations, as a result of which the calculation of the planned load gave underestimates.
Further, in the edge banding section, for some batches of parts, the operation time reached high values. As a result, there was downtime at work stations following the edgebanding section according to the production route. The use of logistics principles and specialized software algorithms made it possible to calculate the sizes of optimal batches of parts at the output of the edge banding section. As a result, downtime at workplaces of the following stages of the technological process decreased by 20-25% of the total monthly working time.
Production logistics pays significant attention to the formation of an optimal level of inventories of materials and components. If inventories are excessive, a situation arises of misuse of financial resources spent on the acquisition and storage of surplus and surplus materials. The opposite situation, when the requirements for fulfilling the production plan are incorrectly assessed, leads to the fact that jobs are idle due to insufficient availability of materials and the deadlines for fulfilling orders are postponed.
To calculate the optimal inventory level for production, fairly common logistics methods (for example, MRP) and software are used that automate the labor-intensive process of calculation and evaluation. In addition, an important rule of logistics is quality control of production operations and prompt registration of defects at workplaces for re-processing of parts in production. In this case, the joint use of mechanisms for operational monitoring of production and software tools for automating material and quantitative accounting makes it possible to achieve an optimal level of inventory and, through constant monitoring of defects in the workplace and taking measures to eliminate the causes of its occurrence, reduce the inappropriate use of materials.
As a practical example, here is an excerpt from the results of implementing an automated system " ITM"at one of the furniture factories in the Nizhny Novgorod region:
“...For each reporting period, we analyzed the actual balances of the warehouse of materials and raw materials with accounting data. As a result, the remains were different, and very different. Together with the technologist, warehouse manager and production foremen, over the course of three reporting periods, the reasons were found and, accordingly, an accounting of defects from the supplier and its write-off or return was developed, acts of write-off for the use of material not for its intended purpose, production defects, but most importantly, we reviewed everything standards per unit of production. And they came to amazing results. Firstly, a picture of defects in production is visible; constant work is already underway with suppliers regarding the return of low-quality products. Technological maps with cost standards have been adjusted, in some places material savings are visible, in others there is overconsumption - this is a specific task for the technologist, to work on reducing costs per unit of production without reducing the level of quality. A simple comparison method - changing the standards or material in the technological map - you can get the result in the form of profitability of the finished product ... "
The effectiveness of using logistics approaches to organizing production largely depends on the type and volume of products produced (small-scale, mixed, completely made to order). The application of basic principles of logistics is not a one-time action, but a constant implementation of activities with analysis and control of intermediate results of technological processes. In combination with these activities, the use of an automation system" ITM" allows you to improve the quality of functioning of both individual accounting structures and logistics processes as a whole at the enterprise.
Lukyanyuk Alexander Sergeevich
Technical director of the company Polysoft Consulting"
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