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What is Six Sigma?

Ceo ViewPoint Interview with Alf Sherk at SherTrack

It has been a pleasure to interview Alf Sherk, CEO of SherTrack, a warm individual with an eye for the detail that counts for your manufacturing business.

We look at how SherTrack’s Predictive Analytics Tools can cut production line set up costs by as much as 20-30% in complex manufacturing plants.

Insights driven from the application of predictive analytics means that manufacturers can have more precision with making the right products at the right time and significant benefits the key performance indicators (KPIs), such as OEE, OTD, production capacity and inventory levels.

1. How does SherTrack’s predictive analytic technology benefit Lean Manufacturing?

If you have 50-100 products to make on one production line, which product do you make at what time? This is where Lean’s Kanban method breaks down.

However, applying Predictive Analytics to the entire customer order stream makes the Lean Pull process viable. Predictive Analytics provides a synthetic order stream over the operating time horizon that addresses this very difficult issue. Combined with probabilistic inventory and scheduling engines, the very efficient Lean Pull process can drive significant performance improvements. It is this combination that we refer to as demand-driven predictive manufacturing.

2. How are these innovations applied in complex manufacturing operations?

Using a Lean Pull based order-to-fulfilment process will create the biggest business benefits. However, there are two other important sources of value to manufacturers that would not require deployment in operations.

The first of these is improving the precision of capacity planning in complex plants. When many products compete for the same production resources, effective capacity is consumed with production transitions or set-ups. Rough-cut-capacity planning and master production scheduling are blind to the impact of sequence dependent transition times and product specific run rates. Therefore, these methods are incapable providing capacity plans with high precision. Our integrated predictive demand analysis, inventory planning and finite scheduling provides much greater precision for tactical planning.

The second area is Six Sigma enabled operational excellence initiatives in complex plants. These plants are constrained by multivariate processes that are notoriously difficult to analyze. Six Sigma teams often hit the wall at the analyze and improve phases of DMAIC (define, measure, analyze, improve, control). We have put our tools in a discrete event simulation harness so that these plants can be thoroughly studied using techniques such as design-of-experiment.

3. What is the value of these approaches to manufacturing operations?

It makes the very efficient Lean Pull applicable to far more facilities than just make-to-order operations. This performance gain is realized in improved Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE%), higher on-time-delivery (OTD%), fewer product set up, quicker time to respond, less inventory and higher effective capacity in plants.

Richard Smith and Greg Schlegel published the results of applying demand-driven predictive manufacturing at one of Bayer Material Science’s compounding facilities in the June, 2009 issue of Supply Chain Management Review.

Production setups were reduced by over 20%, OTD% improved from 89% to 95% with significant reductions in inventory. APICS reported similar improvements for Lyondell Basell in this published case study.

And you can produce to actual demand without churning your plants…

Great thanks to Alf Sherk for the interview, if you are interested in finding out more about SherTrack’s Innovative Predictive Analytics tools please telephone: 001 734-462-6220 or visit their web-site for more information http://www.shertrack.com.