I know I said I would “live-blog” the process I go through when taking responsibility for materials management on a program, but I took a detour that will wind up being incredibly valuable. Someday.
Among my career experiences I was fortunate to work in marketing for a period of time when a new VP was hired to bring organizational leadership to the business development process. The first thing he did was hunker down in his office with several members of his staff, dissecting the business development status of the company. After a couple weeks he emerged from his office to give a presentation to the staff, explaining that the first thing he does when he takes on new responsibilities is to put the challenge into perspective.
As I mentioned, this is a mature program with significant challenges. Taking my cue from this former manager, I pulled my usual post-MRP-run reports: Backlog, Planned Orders, Open Orders, On-Hand Inventory. I normally lay the data out in Excel and do the math: how many units have to be built, how many units are on-hand, how many units are being built in the open orders, and how many units remain to be built. Simply put, the way production scheduling and MRP work is: (more…)
Tags: backlog, challenges, human error, lead time, material availability, materials management, MRP, production scheduling
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