Pull planning through shipping

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To improve OP, the warehouse must work like clockwork, and shipment must proceed without any failures.

Example .

The growth rate of office supplies production at one Russian company has slowed. The territory cannot be expanded, and moving the site is not profitable. The warehouse turned food and beverage email list out to be a weak point: the shipment of goods was too slow, and trucks accumulated in a small warehouse area or stood idle on narrow approaches to the plant.

Pull planning through shipping

Source: shutterstock.com

With the help of WMS (Warehouse Management System), the owner automated the warehouse and implemented cellular storage. Thanks to this, the turnover increased 3-4 times.

However, production ceased to comply: instead of the goods expected by customers, they produced those that took up space in the warehouse and had to wait for customers themselves. The KPI identified discrepancies and eliminated them, replacing them with a general indicator - the delivery of the assortment planned for shipment in the next 2-3 days. As a result, the deadlines for fulfilling orders of the commercial service and the deadlines for releasing products in production were synchronized.

The problems of packing and shipping were solved after changing the meaning and function of production planning, and planners developed algorithms for coordinating requests from production and the commercial department. The waiting time from order to receipt of the product by the customer was reduced from 5 days to 1.


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Establish the information function of the OP
The main functions of production planning include flow transparency and feedback. Information about planned release dates is most important for the production director and the commercial service.

Example .

A medical equipment manufacturing plant regularly missed orders. The commercial department's complaint was that it was supplying orders and equipment, but only half of the required range of products was being produced.

Businessmen and manufacturers blamed each other for everything.

The situation at the production facility itself was not the best. In order to increase the wage fund, technologists began to overstate the standards. And in order to increase a worker's earnings, they wrote him a double time standard for a simple operation.

In addition, the actual production speed and that indicated by technologists may differ. Due to the lack of independent sources, managers had to rely only on reports from specialists. And also run to the workshop and watch the movement of their orders.

To solve the problems, the production planning process was reorganized. Only 1 person (instead of 5) was engaged in OP. The released employees were transferred to the positions of dispatchers working with the workshops. The new task was to communicate the planned tasks, which were prepared in the information system, to the workshops. And also to control their execution.

The increase in staff did not require additional costs and investments in the information system were more than repaid. Production planning became truly operational, as the project preparation time was reduced from 3 days to 2 hours! As a rule, dispatchers are aware of all production deviations. Previously, they reported this once a day, but now they began to report it to the system.

The commercial department and production management were informed through it. Thanks to this, the planner was able to see all the information about deviations in shipment dates in real time and correct them before it was too late.

Thus, information on loading, release and necessary materials began to be transmitted every hour to the management, and emergency data transmission was added in case of emergency. The commercial department now had the opportunity to view the process of fulfilling each order and see the actual deadlines. If any force majeure violated the deadlines, the company would be able to notify the buyers in time.