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by Beth Stackpole, Contributing Editor Posted on Tuesday, May 22, 2007 3:54:47 PM   | Abstract: | Manufacturer cooks up custom designs by leveraging PLM platform and key performance metrics to inject agility and structure into its product-development processes. |
Making refrigerated display cases for retail giants like Wal-Mart and Starbucks or mom-and-pop purveyors of specialty foods is not a one-size-fits-all proposition. Just ask Structural Concepts Corp. Although the Muskegon, MI, manufacturer does make standard, off-the-shelf cases, nearly 80% of what it sells involves some form of custom engineering work. With an average of 50 projects to juggle a week, the company's engineering and manufacturing groups until recently had all they could handle just keeping custom requests straight and on schedule, let alone trying to optimize production by reusing job designs. Not surprisingly, development cycle times were prone to stretch, with the company's engineering department often taking blame as a bottleneck. But it wasn't the only guilty party. Sales and marketing, for its part, contributed to the lag time by neglecting to convey key customer requests and request-for-quote information to manufacturing in a timely fashion. The result was a lack of project visibility that led to internal finger pointing and miscommunication and forced the $40 million manufacturer into a periodic scramble to avoid customer dissatisfaction over mounting quality and time-to-market snafus. "We were struggling with lack of process standards, lack of information, and poor resource allocation," admits Viktor Anderson, director of engineering for Structural Concepts. "We were dumping projects in, giving them to someone we thought could handle them, and whenever we could get it done, we'd get it done." That kind of unstructured development process and impromptu scheduling didn't jibe with the mantra from company management, made a couple of years earlier: To buckle down, improve quality, and get projects out the door faster in an effort to bring on more business. Cutting back on custom orders as a means of streamlining design and manufacturing was out of the question, however. "We have standard models, but no one wants them," Anderson explains. "Our customers are used to getting custom solutions -- that's what they expect and what sets us apart." Structural Concepts' answer came in the form of Aras Corp.'s (Lawrence, MA) Innovator Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) platform, which had the right mix of activity management and workflow capabilities, including an easy-to-use dashboard that clearly depicts where a particular project stands in the pipeline. That has helped Structural Concepts live up to management mandates, cutting average cycle time for getting projects out the door from around three to four weeks to about one or two weeks. Green Means Go Structural Concepts faces a problem a lot of manufacturers of custom or semi-custom goods share: how to inject visibility and agility into their engineer-to-order product development processes so they can continue to meet customer demand and differentiate themselves from the competition. Finding a platform to facilitate collaboration among the different constituencies involved in product design and manufacturing is just part of the equation. For Structural Concepts and others, there's also a need to monitor activities, flag potential problem areas, and leverage key performance metrics to drive continuous improvement throughout the process and keep everyone on the same page. Before deploying the Aras products, Structural Concepts didn't use PLM, nor did the company closely analyze process metrics. "These were things we weren't able to do before because we didn't have anything that grabbed that kind of data, nor did we have anyone focused on this kind of analysis," Anderson says. Structural Concepts got started with the Aras implementation in 2003, after taking a full nine months to analyze how products moved through its cycles and then using a cross-functional team to map out and put a formalized structure to the process. Now, a year into the implementation, the company is starting to leverage the metrics available in the system (dubbed key performance indicators) to fine-tune processes, further improve time-to-market on custom orders, and manage by exception. Page : 1 2 3 ... NEXT |