Flow Manufacturing is the Essential Component in Your Supply Chain Strategy

Overview: The article tells that the industry has got a new ERP System to back bone the company’s information management infrastructure. Now the industry is entering the new age of Supply Chain Management trying to tie all the nodes of the supply chain together so that materials flow seamlessly along a path beginning with a customer’s order and pulling through from the raw material supplier all the way through the process. Supply Chain Management is to the twenty first century manufacturing enterprise as MRP was to the factory of the 1970s; the overriding framework that points the business toward the customer. The customer of the MRP and post MRP era could put up with the fixed (and mostly long) lead times, inflexible product structures and, the high cost of batch/subassembly/final assembly manufacturing and inventory management of that time. Every supply chain is different and the driver of differentiation is the products or product lines in the particular supply chain. Taking a hard look at products and supply chains and categorizing them permits us to start tailoring the flow operation to each one and thereby make the individual supply chains more sensitive to the customers’ value chain. All the emphasis on the “extended enterprise supply chain” is appropriate to successful competition in the modern world economy. Further the article points out that the heart of the supply chain is its center, the shop floor, and for goods to flow in a seamless fashion from raw material supplier to customer, they have to get though manufacturing in a smooth flow.

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Format: HTML | Date: Jan 2003 | Pages: 1