Thank you for your interest in our Lean BI information.

Below is the requested White Paper:          

Lean Business Intelligence™ for Manufacturing and Supply Chain Operations

 A White Paper

Operations people need the power of real Business Intelligence (BI). They make the hard decisions on the ground every day, all day. They need the power and reach of BI to help them make the correct decisions with more ease, not more complexity added to their lives. Lean Manufacturing proponents and implementers have developed their own brand of “BI”, (i.e. value stream maps, muda walks, the 8 wastes, kanban, jidoka, etc.) simply because there were not many real-time and effective tools in place previously.

No one should have to be a mechanic to shift their car from drive to reverse. Nor should they have to put in a work order for a mechanic specialist to schedule an appointment well into the future to provide them the alternate vehicle direction, probably well after the need to change direction has passed. But this analogy holds well within the current world of almost all BI and software applications in place today.

In other words, current BI software is the antithesis of Lean!

It is too common to have obsolete reports, and many of them, being generated for years after their usefulness has expired. Many a manufacturing manager gets these reports handed to them on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, only to round file them and go to their own version of BI, usually housed within an Excel spreadsheet to get the “real data”, rankings and relevancies from current data. Few Lean Manufacturing implementations rely on the printed page. It is much more practical to “go see” what is happening in the factory in real-time, than to trust trailing indicator information from traditional BI reports.

For BI to become a strategy embraced by manufacturing operational executives, managers and Lean Leaders, it will need to evolve into a much more user friendly and adaptable product than it is today. It goes without saying that it will need to provide answers to pressing problems via easy to manipulate and understand analytics and views in a real-time or near-real-time world. A true Lean Enterprise Performance Management (LeanEPM™) system is needed.

IT departments need to be taken out of the loop. The ideal Lean Manufacturing and Lean Supply Chain operations’ BI tool will be completely intuitive, graphic in nature, well interfaced, globally available and will not require any IT programming or report generation, what-so-ever. The operation’s user should be able to “reprogram” it, on-the-fly as required, by the use of simple drop down menus, wizards and point and clicks. The analogy of try out a new cell layout and if it doesn’t work, try out another and another until the desired result is achieved, should be considered here.

This is precisely why there are millions of copies of Excel out there in manufacturing land. The need has been for a decision support, BI tool that was similar in nature to Excel, but can assemble all that atomic data from a product line, a cell, a department, or the entire enterprise and point out to the user in a clear way, on one easy to view screen, what is relevant, useful and in direct correlation or opposition to company goals, KPIs, trends and direction, without customer programming and/or report writing.

Also, the ideal BI Dashboard tool would be this kind of Lean tool. It would be one that is easily manipulated, such that a CEO can look at his or her key metrics, and the underlying data that is driving them, and make quick and meaningful decisions in real-time At the same moment the Plant Manager is able to look at a similar Dashboard with his set of KPIs on it and quickly determine what is driving them, by drilling down into the same raw data as he sees fit. Similarly, anyone else in the enterprise, at any other level, should be able to enjoy the same degree of visibility, analysis and customization without delay or any technical IT expertise being required.

Lean Business Intelligence™ software as a Lean Manufacturing enablement tool addresses these issues.

The impacts of this new found power for Manufacturing Operations and Supply Chain Management are huge. Specific Business Case ROIs can be justified within every discipline and at every level of the organization. Most manufacturing companies and their related Supply Chain Partners have very similar organizational and functional definitions. For the purpose of defining and organizing a set of BI tools that would benefit the bulk of this constituency, the following organizational generalizations have been made:

A complete end-to-end solution environment to drive profit, quality, cost and delivery improvements through Enterprise Dense Data analysis and View would be made up of 10 major analytical modules:

• Lean Value Stream Management – strategically looking at the entire Value Stream including Lean Manufacturing and Supply Chain optimization management

• Lean Production Management – shop floor performance and management analytics

• Lean Facilities Management – analytics for equipment uptime and maintenance performance management and other support functions

• Lean Finance Management – maximizing profitability, financial controls and compliance monitoring

• Lean Workforce Management – strategic views of Human Relations management

• Lean Quality Management – analytics of performance yields and lean/six sigma

• Lean Vendor Management –analytics for products and services procurement management

• Lean Customer Management – for management of the entire customer relationship, channels and fulfillment cycle

• Lean Enterprise Management – analytics of business systems, inter and intra-departmental, company and partner interfaces across the Supply Chain

• Lean Network Management –real-time analytics for on-line operations

Each of the Lean Business Intelligence™ modules is made up of analysis and views that are derived from atomic, dense data mining, query and analysis in real-time or near-real-time. The goal is to leverage Key Performance Indicator (KPI) metrics to drive sets of analytical tools and display servers.

This solution is founded on the principle that one picture is worth a million words, or more appropriately, a million spreadsheets. Rather than looking at low-density dashboard data, the strategy for Lean Leaders and Managers alike, is to query millions of atomic data inputs and only view the relevant and interesting ones all within the same computer screen real estate that a traditional dashboard, or just a fraction of a complex spreadsheet uses.

What follows is an overview of each of the 10 Manufacturing Operations and Supply Chain modules:

Lean Value Stream Management

Lean Value Stream Management enables Business Managers, Value Stream Managers, Product Managers and Executives to have an end-to-end view of the business, seeing overall financial, sales, delivery, channel partner and operational performance.  Managers can use key performance indicator metrics to see inside and outside the entire enterprise to pinpoint opportunities to more profitable business execution, along with Lean Manufacturing / Lean Supply Chain strategy deployment and product throughput time reduction efforts.  Lean Value Stream Management is designed to enable five key analytical areas:

• Value Stream Performance Management

• Strategic Management Analysis

• Supply Chain Management

• Supply, Demand, Inventory and Fulfillment Analysis

• Strategic Business Discovery

The main ROI goal of the Lean Value Stream BI Dashboard component is to assist in reducing product throughput times by visualizing the entire value stream flow via product, process & information details and identify constraints.

By seeing throughput times, schedule performances, value adding and non value adding events in near real time allows for an analysis and understanding of current state business conditions, customer demands, performance to those demands, performance to operational, finance and quality metrics, wastes, delays and process details.

The ability to produce views, both static and animated, of any time period, both past and future allows for predictive, what if and future state possibilities.

Internal personnel and external partners will gain the visibility within Sales, Marketing, Production Control, Purchasing, Logistics, Distributors, Warehouses, Dealers, Retailers, Service Technicians, Vendors and Suppliers.

By integrating multiple data sources such as ERP, MRP, Data Warehouses and Flat Files (Excel) throughout the above businesses and departments allows for enhanced visibility and performance to attain desired ROIs in weeks, rather than months.

Lean Production Management

Lean Production Management enables managers and supporting engineers to manage the entire manufacturing shop floor by seeing it from geographic (plant, department, cell/line, machine, warehouse, storage, logistics), floor layout perspectives.

A key ROI opportunity within Lean Production Management is to improve Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE). By being able to simultaneously see and monitor in near-real-time, all equipment availability, productivity and quality performance, equipment downtime and resource under utilization can be significantly lessened. Large payback opportunities result from improved efficiencies, quality, delivery performance and increased net capacities.

Performance can be seen for all assets by shift, and/or any time period. Stakeholders can also see scheduling KPIs to balance machines, maximize capacities and resources.

Revenue, cost and profit can be seen in animations, as well as by day over day, week over week, month over month, or year over year performance.  With Lean Production Management, engineers and managers will be able to quickly pinpoint opportunities for profit improvement on a per-product and per-operation basis to better serve their Manufacturing customers.  Views for Lean Production Management include:

• Shop Floor Performance Optimization

• Machine/Asset Schedule Balancing

• Manufacturing Profit Analysis

• Inventory Analysis

• Key Manufacturing Metrics

• Product/Asset Quality Analysis

The primary ROI goal of Lean Production Management is to help identify the optimal shop floor configuration and loading design that will lead to performing more closely to customer and internal financial and operational requirements such as higher output/capacity, reduced costs, improved margins, reduced inventories and improved customer satisfaction.

By visually reviewing all job schedules and priorities, it more feasible to allocate resources by shift, overtime and machine capacity constraints. By measuring elemental, cycle, total and takt times visually, it is easier to see and maintain adherence to standards and expected output. Key measurements such as productivity, efficiency, utilization and quality output can be viewed at any level of granularity, from the entire shop to an individual process step.

Lean Facility Management

Lean Facility Management Analytics enables operation’s managers to understand how the interaction and performance of operational support departments contribute to the overall performance of the enterprise. This module provides an operation’s centric set of views that clarify how machine uptime, documentation, resource and part availability contribute to the performance and profitability of the enterprise.

Operation’s managers can use key metrics to pinpoint opportunities to more profitable operational execution.  Lean Facility Management consists of three major modules:

• Maintenance Optimization

• Engineering Support Optimization

• Operations’ Support

A key ROI opportunity from Lean Facility Management is to identify and segment TPM performance characteristics to achieve better machine uptime.

By assessing machine downtime characteristics visually, the task of ranking and prioritizing cause and effects becomes much clearer. As Engineers see and analyze the interactions between parts, processes, tools and machines visually, the affinities causing sub-par performance begin to surface.

The results are the reduction in machine and process downtime, improved machine and resource utilization, increased inventory turns, decreased costs and increased productivity.

Lean Finance Management

Lean Finance Management delivers asset and enterprise performance to view a full range of financial analysis and information groupings. Traditional financial metrics that are associated with Profit and Loss Statements, Balance Sheets, AP, AR, etc., can be modeled and analyzed over any comparative time periods and other variables such as cost centers, product lines, value streams, etc. can be selected and viewed.

Inputs, outputs and hyperlinks to corporate Balanced Scorecards can be viewed and quickly analyzed for trends, associations and variances.

Additional analyses which are difficult and time consuming to complete with traditional tools, can easily and quickly be completed using the Lean Finance Management module. An example is revenue and profit by product, versus associated assets, locations and resource allocations for that product.

With sophisticated analytical tools, financial analysts can monitor revenues, expenses, G&A and associated trends, costs, cost categories and their origins, vendor, customer and product financial performances and cost of sales.

The power and reach of Lean Finance Management into the tables of data within the ERP and/or Financial Systems can allow management and analysts to see the entire P & L and Balance Sheet performance for any financial period, or period to period comparison, on one page!

Lean Workforce Management

Lean Workforce Management brings a whole new dimension of possibilities to the Human Resource management of the business by providing analyses and views to capitalize upon the most value asset a company has, its personnel.

Lean Workforce Management enables managers to monitor and manage their workforce costs, allocations, time and labor. Employee growth through training programs, cross-training results for specific job skills, on-line learning experiences and on-the-job training can all be tracked and viewed by job category, location and/or curriculum.

With an active system of workforce views company managers can see employee skills development, training, growth and incentive programs, facility, departmental and individual labor performances, time being charged to specific projects, jobs and/or accounts, load balancing of labor resources according to specific patterns as they develop.

Key areas of Human Resource monitoring such as cross-training, department and individual performance, employee turnover and resulting impacts, applications and/or promotions in the pipeline, transfers, reassignments, improvement plans, terminations, healthcare and other benefits being consumed can all be seen for impact and interrelationships using Lean Workforce Management views.

Lean Quality Management

Lean Quality Management is a comprehensive module that provides views of product quality yields, non-conformances and the various systems involved in the QA/QC, Lean/SixSigma processes.

The main ROI opportunity within Quality Management is to identify and segment both product and process quality performance characteristics so that best-in-class quality output can be achieved. By seeing the quantifiable key performance indicator quality related performances such as scrap, rework, repair, holds, etc. and their causes, locations and affinities, improvement strategies and programs can be put into effect and  monitored to reduce annualized cost of quality, thus improving net capacity and margin performance.

Understanding the actual cost of quality through overall plant, department, cell/line, and machine performance gives the Lean Quality Management unprecedented management tools to understand cause and effects. With drill downs to specific shifts, resources and product operations, it can be very clear, very fast where exactly the non-conformances are coming from.

Monitoring requirements associated with ISO 9000 / QS 9000 etc, military and FAA, regulatory affairs, PPAP compliance and Six-Sigma are made much easier through viewing and exception highlighting. Seeing Internal systems and controls such as Quality Audits, metrology and calibration, statistical process control (SPC), design of experiments (DOE), failure mode analysis (FMEA), test and inspection results, source inspection, document control and non-destructive testing are vital to keeping each item in full compliance.

With a rules-based system of quality performance views, Statistical Process Control (SPC) characteristics can be precisely monitored for desired output. Hundreds of SPC charts can be aggregated and culled for out-of-tolerance conditions, leading to method improvements to improve quality.

Lean Vendor Management

Lean Vendor Management is a supplier facing tool that gives the procurement team visibility in a clear and tailored way to better manage the sourcing of purchased material and services.

Lean Vendor Management provides a cost effective solution to quickly identify, prioritize, and aggregate product and service resource requirements. It allows for management of the difficult task of balancing procured resources with product and production requirements. By establishing sound sourcing plans, schedules and visibility, procurement professionals can meet schedule, cost and quality requirements on time and within budget.

Lean Vendor Management enables suppliers to be monitored, surveyed and partnered with in ways that achieve the goal of a mutually acceptable business relationship.

With rules-based views of the Supply Base the purchasing team can mange the performance of the Supply Chain, measure perfect order fulfillment; view millions of RFID and EDI transactions while seeing exceptions to desired KPI performance.

Through dense data analysis of all procurement transactions buyers can determine product cost, track procurement spending, see period performance and more easily view the reverse-Supply-Chain process.

Supplier status can be viewed, products, parts, inventory in process can be located, procurement transaction details and status can be reviewed, preferred supplier certifications and status can be seen and Kanban requirements and actual performance can be accurately viewed.

Lean Vendor Management improves the quality of overall service from supplier partners. Visibility of key events allows for closer control and profit from the entire procurement cycle and Supply Chain.

Lean Customer Management

The Lean Customer Management Suite includes:

• Channel Performance Management

• Sales Management Analysis

• Service Management

• Order Management Analysis

View key performance indicators from promotions with partners, trade promotions and resulting revenue. Manage the claims process and reduce write-offs and losses due to underperforming relationships.

Effectively plan and monitor company sales activities to budget and on schedule. Manage the entire sales cycle more effectively with visibility into each time consuming task that makes up the initial call-to-deal cycle. View partner involvement in complex deals. Recognize and optimize the incentive component of the sales process.

Track and analyze the overall service experience from a customer satisfaction point of view. View repair technicians, repair parts and promise dates. Effectively manage the availability and location of spares and resources to service them.

See the entire order fulfillment process from pricing through delivery, including logistics, transportation and warehouse management.

Order visibility and timing is critical to the fulfillment process. Configuring orders correctly is vital to being able to provide a promise date that is both realistic and acceptable to the customer.

Once ordered, the Order Management Optimization modules allows for global order tracking, analyzing cross-company, cross-channel timelines, expenses and performance.

Logistics, transportation, warehousing, distribution, vendor managed inventories (VMI) as well as internal inventory control and visibility is critical to the fulfillment process. Seeing performance KPIs related to these necessities are mandatory to control these processes. With typical systems, it can take days to process and maximize the quality of the deliverables. By utilizing the analytical capabilities of the Order Management Optimization module, this complex set of interactions can be viewed and understood in a fraction of the time.

Lean Enterprise Management

Much of the order-to-cash or quote-to-cash or engineer-to-cash cycles are made up of expensive and time consuming administrative processes and complex systems. Visualizing the front office and back office tasks that make up this significant portion of enterprise cost is vital to competitiveness today.

Tremendous amounts of data is either transmitted via various business systems, or is lying dormant in those systems, unable to be viewed in any meaningful way by convention means. I.T. systems, infrastructure and application processes need to be fully analyzed for performance, as it relates to overall company performance and the order-to-cash timeline.

Analysis of the data/information flowing from these large and sometimes very disparate systems can be difficult. The number and complexity of key performance indicators to be considered for analysis is large. Analysis is required that provides at the same time, both a wide view of the interactions of all these systems across the enterprise as well as a drill-down microscopic view of individual system performance.

Lean Network Management

Lean Network Management delivers real-time data to view operations for managers and staff.   Lean Network Management consists of three modules:

• Web-based Activity Optimization

• Mobile, Hand-held and Self-Service Device Optimization

• Barcode and RFID Analysis and Optimization

These tools provide the appropriate managers and staff with a 360º customer relationship view to locate the highest-yield customer/product relationships across all channels of the real-time environments. This allows for proactive service, real-time incentives and customer satisfaction with the right information at the right time for the right results.  This enables real-time monitoring and management of customers, costs with an unmatched level of command and control to drive dramatic improvements to your revenues and bottom-line performance. 

Barcode and RFID Analysis and Optimization enable managers and staff to rapidly access information about the products so equipped regardless of physical location. Management can see real-time product activity across a network and how well customer expectations are being served.  Staff in turn uses, Mobile, Hand-held and Self-Service Device Optimization to gain real-time insights that they can leverage to improve product performance across the various channels.

Web-based Activity Optimization brings a whole new dimension of possibilities to manufacturing businesses by outsourcing tasks such as order entry, order administration, tracking, status, modifications and advanced shipment notification (ASN) visibility, allowing them to capitalize on opportunities as they unfold and leveraging the true value of real-time data.

Web-based Activity Optimization enables managers and engineers to monitor and manage their products/customers, inventory and costs with an unmatched level of Command and Control to drive dramatic improvements to an enterprises top and bottom line performance. 

Web-based Activity Optimization delivers Real-time “streaming” views of the enterprise network every few minutes or seconds.  This module manages a real-time data store of hand-held, customer and call field data feeds.

Outsource product statusing to your customers with specific customer portals that will allow them to view the position, quantity and status of their products in work. This can free up your resources to work on more productive, value-adding activities.

All of the above features are available over the web.   Through the use of JavaScript, a standard web-browser, without plug-ins, can select views using simple drop down menus. These view images can be clicked on to zoom in to various parts of the image.  By simply hovering the mouse over the browser window factual information about the view will appear.

The recommended deployment strategy for these advanced Lean Business Intelligence™ Tools includes moving away from traditional software deployment within the IT department. Experience shows that power users within Manufacturing Operations and Supply Chain Management can best use these flexible and powerful tools to gain the most insight into their areas of expertise when left to create and explore the content-rich environment their data bases have to offer.

Anitech "Lean Business Intelligence™"

Copyright 2007 Anitech, Inc.

For More Information Email: info@anitech.net

                             Value Stream Mapping

                                 Value Stream Mapping of:

                      Shop, process & material flows,

                                              or
                        Business Systems, Information
                              & Supply Chain flows