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Kathy Barthelt
/ Categories: Infor LN & Baan Tips

Baan/LN Tip of the Week: Top 10 Survival Tips For Manufacturers

by Guy Morgan / IndustryWeek

Under intense cost pressures, quality is at risk at many manufacturers. These 10 tips can help you survive the competitive challenges ahead.

  1. Maintain your focus. Make a decision about the kind of company you are and stick with it. 
  2. Reinvent your products regularly. Suppliers who sharply differentiate their products fare the best. 
  3. Maximize your productivity and increase your speed through enhanced product and process design. Lean manufacturing focuses on production and its associated costs from a component's conception.
  4. Pay attention to your supply chain. You must know about any risks, financial or otherwise, that threaten your suppliers. 
  5. Offshoring vs Onshoring. You must know the total cost of products. 
  6. Improve quality. There are still too many manufacturers delivering components with high defect rates. 
  7. Diversify your customer base. This may involve segmenting your industry or going outside it.
  8. Embrace globalization. Acquisitions, consolidations and diversification can help suppliers achieve economies of scale. 
  9. Invest in your employees. Suppliers who paid higher wages and made bigger investments in training and equipment came through the downturn better than those who didn't.
  10. Facilitate total productive maintenance. While this concept has been around for decades, some manufacturers are still not training machine operators to perform many of the day-to-day tasks of simple maintenance and fault-finding.

Optimize Your Manufacturing Today!

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Kathy Barthelt

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Tips:  LX | BPCS | M3

The LMP module (Lean Manufacturing Process) uses work centers but refers to them as production cells.

A cell is one or more work centers that produces an end item. So when a company decides to adopt the lean manufacturing philosophy, the concept of work centers takes on a new meaning.

In lean terms, the work center, or group of work centers, becomes a production cell. In other words, a mini-factory producing end items with similar characteristics.
Understanding:

The Machine Master File

Do your machines have a fixed asset tag? The machine master file has a field called Fixed Asset.

BPCS does not use this field, so you can use this field for anything. You can record your fixed asset tag in this field and use the effective date. You can create a custom fixed asset list by using a DFU or Query program.

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Tips: LN | Baan

Instead of sharing tables through logical linking, you can replicate table content between companies. This approach allows certain non-key attributes of a record to vary by company. For example, if you replicate bills of materials rather than sharing them, each company can associate a different warehouse with the same bill of material. This way, the bills of materials are consistent across companies, while the warehouses can differ.

Replication also enables selective availability of records in other companies. For instance, when replicating items, you might limit which items are available in a sales company based on their item group, only including end items. You can further refine replication to specific subsets, such as particular item groups.

Keep in mind that replication requires any referenced tables to be either replicated or shared as well.

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