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.
Structural Concepts is furthest along in improving its five-point proposal process, the approach the company uses to determine whether or not a custom order is a good opportunity for the company. Previously, the evaluation of each proposal was done manually by the marketing group. Today, it's fully automated in Aras, which greatly improves Structural Concepts' ability to respond to project proposals. "We are much more efficient and able to process requests quicker through the business decision stage," says Danielle McMiller, the company's marketing director.
The company is also now building a database within Aras of all the data collected during the quoting process, which greatly assists in design reuse. "Before, everything was written in hard copy form and put in a file, which wasn't easily accessible by everyone, and you'd have to remember if you quoted something earlier that was similar to what was being requested," McMiller explains. "With Aras, we can do a search on a description or a word, and see if we've quoted a similar job. That makes us much more streamlined and efficient."
Next the company plans to use the system's KPI functions to, for example, determine the average lead time on projects. Structural Concepts will then use that information as a means to improve scheduling. Metrics will help determine what steps in the process are the most time-consuming, allowing management to make adjustments and bolster throughput. The KPI capabilities can even be applied to fortify Structural Concepts' quote process, giving executives a way to determine if an outstanding quote is still valid in light of what resources are available and what's in the development pipeline at any given time.
Beyond that, Structural Concepts plans to use Aras to improve project management within the company and tighten up engineering change order processes.
Stopping the Blame Game
Already, having improved visibility into projects has been instrumental in smoothing out the relationship between engineering and marketing. With the lines of communications open, marketing is now able to clearly show engineering all outstanding quotes that could materialize into orders, helping them to prepare better and, if necessary, prioritize jobs for optimum scheduling.
"Before, engineering was in the dark before a project came down; they'd have no visibility about how much work was out there for them," McMiller says. "Now we have a lot more understanding as a team of how things are being done. It's not just a dictate from marketing."
Structural Concepts' engineering team has also found that putting structure to the development process has reduced errors and made engineering much more accountable, McMiller says.
Getting the engineering group committed to the project didn't take a whole lot of persuasion, according to Russ Stone, engineering supervisor responsible for all scheduling. While Stone's 18-plus engineers had to change work habits -- getting rigorous about checking email, for example, and completing activities and tasks in Aras -- they soon saw the benefits. Perhaps the most noticeable improvement was how the increased visibility helped get everyone working together more effectively, without playing the old blame game.
The Aras dashboard shows the status of each project along with its active tasks and activities. Each task is depicted in a different color. Red highlights a problem that demands attention; a green alert, on the other hand, means everything is on track. The system automatically initiates the proper workflow to escalate each project to the next stage of development.
This approach gives individuals from marketing or manufacturing, for example, a direct view into their particular projects, and also tells them where they stand vis a vis the rest of the Structural Concepts pipeline.
"It keeps the phone from ringing off the hook or being bombarded with emails inquiring about where this project is," Stone says. "It gives others visibility and gives us accountability in our department. In that way, tasks get completed and nothing is forgotten."