8 | | NOVEMBER 2024L et us focus in the next lines on the so-called Micro-Supply Chain Management. In my terminology this will be all operations managed and handled inside of a factory. In other words, all material management between the Goods Receipt Area of a manufacturing site and the Dispatch of Finished Goods to the relevant customers. For a usual manufacturing site, you have the operational department, which organizes the relevant production and manufacturing steps in the facility. This can be several full-, semi- or partial automatic lines, as well as manual-driven production lines. In the interaction of operations and supply chain, this department is accountable for achieving the cycle production times with the highest efficiency possible. The same counts for the quality of produced parts and, if applicable, the optimization of setup times within tool and product changes on the machines. One of the major targets in this category is labor efficiency and the reduction of downtimes (the opposite meaning will be the increase of uptimes). The part of Micro-Supply Chain Management is creating the right planning parameters for this purpose by taking the customer demands as the key input for all following planning sequences. In many cases, the planning sequence is split into the following categories: 1. Planning of customer demands, with daily call-offs and mid to long-term schedulings.2. Planning of final assembly lines for production, connected to the customer call-off, limited by production lot sizes and capacity of machines and labor. 3. Planning, if applicable, for relevant pre-production lines to build up semifinished products needed for the internal final assembly line production. 4. Planning of procurement for the relevant raw materials and components and to be consumed in the before-mentioned production lines for customer products. All these planning cycles are summarized in the Material Resource Planning (also called MRP) field of a manufacturing company. In each of these manufacturing steps, the governance of running the planning with a powerful ERP system is the key to managing the complexity of wide structures of BOM (Bill of Material) in the different manufacturing industries. To name some of the key parameters to perfection and more automize the planning process, it will be the lot size of production, or the lot size order quantity of purchased parts, safety time, safety stock, lead time of delivery, waiting times CHALLENGES IN MANUFACTURING ENVIRONMENT - SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT. HOW TO GENERATE THE RIGHT MASTER DATA FOR INPUT IN RELEVANT PLANNING PROGRAMSBy Jorin Preuß, Vice President Global Supply Chain Management, WOCO Group IN MY OPINION
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