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by Stephanie Neil, MA Editorial Staff Posted on Sunday, October 28, 2007 1:00:00 AM Sign Up to receive Daily News Alerts in your E-mail Inbox    | Abstract: | A new MESA report reveals a disparity between many manufacturers' operational improvement efforts and the techniques used to measure their effectiveness. |
| Keywords: | collaborative manufacturing execution systems, C-MES |
The Manufacturing Enterprise Solutions Association (MESA) has released its second report in a series of studies on the effectiveness of metrics used to improve operations. The results of the study, Metrics for Major Initiatives: Practices and Metrics for Lean, Total Quality and Real-Time Enterprise Programs, revealed that many organizations don't practice what they preach. The majority of the 133 organizations polled by market research firm Industry Directions Inc. say they are indeed using lean and total quality management practices, and 47% are engaging in real-time enterprise practices. But in each area only a few metrics are considered effective. One is on-time delivery -- based on delivery to commit and delivery to request -- that is used to measure lean's effectiveness. Defect metrics, to take another example, are used to measure total quality, and uptime, or OEE, is used as to figure out how efficiently the real-time enterprise is running. In addition, many manufacturers report that they don't use the same metrics company-wide. As a result, these initiatives, designed to drive out waste, improve quality, and increase efficiency, are not very effective at all, the study says. [Click to continue] |
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