Wayfarer Consulting, LLC

A manufacturer of auto aftermarket exhaust systems and metal fabricator business was struggling with long lead times and managing capacity.  They need to make improvements. By improving their understanding and utilization of their ERP system, they were able to provide far more accurate lead times that were less than they had been quoting.  The shorter lead times enabled them to save work from going to competitors, resulting in about $50,000 more in sales per month.

As is common with many small companies that have grown from modest roots, they tended to use tribal knowledge and simple work arounds, rather than make full use of their ERP system.

The auto aftermarket business involved cutting and bending tubing and welding to create tuned exhaust systems for enthusiasts. The primary focus was on the welding & fabrication department because this had the highest skilled workers and was the bottleneck.

We quickly realized that not all required information was on the routings.  The requirements were documented, but not in a way that would support improved scheduling.  They had the big job of updating the ERP database.

That job done; the next step was to configure the work centers for scheduling. The welding & assembly department had 8 welders of varying skill levels, so work centers were set up by individual.  While this worked, it involved considerable manual scheduling work.  Ultimately, the department was reconfigured in the ERP system to be a single work center with multiple stations.  This allowed the supervisor to assign the work appropriately. Using forward scheduling with the capacity constrained welding operation, the scheduler notice a drop off in load scheduled after about three weeks.  Communicating this to the sales department meant they could now quote lead times of 5 weeks as opposed to the 12-14 weeks they had been promising before.

Similar results were seen on the metal fabrication side of the business when database improvements and scheduling through the system were implemented.  They eliminated using Trello for scheduling, and they managed to keep an extra 1-2 orders per week resulting in extra sales.