Lean Manufacturing SoftwareA lot of manufacturing companies understood the importance of Lean Manufacturing techniques to reduce production costs and time thus enabling faster delivery times which would increase customer satisfaction levels. Once that was realized, business owners felt a desperate need to automate the whole process by means of a software. Many manufacturing companies bought ERP Software which could help them with the Lean Manufacturing implementation to their processes. Is ERP software the only solution to automation of a Lean Manufacturing initiative? Lot of companies have utilized a good ERP software to good effect to ensure that the entire Lean Manufacturing initiative is performed smoothly. That said, companies whose manufacturing process involves high product mix and shared production assets have found an ERP software as an extremely unviable option for them. Such companies went on to buy MES or APS solutions which proved very effective to them in the short run, but results of an MES or APS software could just not be sustained in the long run. Moreover, it was found that an MES software could not cope up with a highly volatile supply-demand environment. All this paved way to integrated performance optimization software which bridged the gaps between an ERP, MES and APS solutions. Machsix Lean Manufacturing Software is one such example. This software has foundations on existing manufacturing solutions and has advanced analytics and simulation software. Machsix allows the manufacturer to understand the supply-demand dynamics and correlates that to your manufacturing operations. This benefit provided by Machsix and other integrated Lean Manufacturing solutions allow the manufacturers to target continuous process improvement on a short as well as a long term. An integrated solution like the one above cuts down inventory and production cycle times by over 50% and allows the manufacturer to meet his delivery times on the product. Some companies who have been using the integrated solutions software have reported on-time delivery rates of about 99% and more. It is a dense market out there with a lot of companies promoting their Lean Manufacturing software solutions to prospective customers. It is extremely important that a manufacturer does a complete feasibility study on the software before a decision is made to buy it. The most important thing for manufacturer will be to decide which software could be the most beneficial for his manufacturing techniques. One must realize that purchasing an integrated solutions software or an ERP software for that matter is not an inexpensive deal. An inaccurate feasibility study will mean that the manufacturer may get distorted results for his Lean Manufacturing techniques. For now, automation seems to be the approach that companies are taking to support their Lean Manufacturing initiatives. And since their results are impressive as yet, they would be here to stay. |