September 1997, Volume 3, No. 9
Case Study:
Smart Software Brightens American Greetings' Day
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September 1997, Volume 3, No. 9 Case Study: |
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The sheer variety of these cards make them a particularly challenging product to manufacture, and American Greetings has completely reengineered its operation, converting an antiquated job shop operation into a state-of-the-art cellular one. As a result, the company has reduced lead times from 21 weeks to seven and last year, the company cut its finished inventory by $22 million. Manufacturing lot sizes have been cut in half, from 60,000 to 30,000. At the heart of this operation is an information system built around Neuron Data's Elements Expert. Using an extensive rules base, the system determines routing and balances work loads to provide an efficient just-in-time operation. This has helped decrease American Greetings' costs, increased efficiencies and created a more adaptive and dynamic application. Headquartered in Cleveland, American Greetings produces its cards for the North American market at three plants. "In 1992, we began making the transition to cellular manufacturing systems," said John Hansley, product manager, manufacturing systems. "We compartmentalized each plant into several mini-factories, or cells. Whereas components in a job shop may do only a single operation, cells are responsible for an entire manufacturing process. Cellular operations leverage just-in-time manufacturing techniques by eliminating the queuing between processes." Today, American Greetings' Kentucky and Arkansas plants are each divided into five cells, while its Toronto plant is divided into two. Each of these mini-factories do "finishing" operations — the final touches added to some cards after the artwork is printed. Elements Expert's principal role in the finishing process is to determine how cards get routed to these manufacturing cells so that delays are minimized and workloads are balanced. Elements Expert's knowledge base contains the specifications of each card, together with the business rules to decide which cells should be used. As operations are changed or added, the system automatically recalculates the routing process. The rules-based approach has given developers at American Greetings the ability to keep the knowledge base both comprehensive and current. "We started out thinking we could summarize the data, but we soon realized we needed to have the ultimate flexibility to handle any criteria that users could give us," said Chris Heywood, application development specialist. The knowledge base also helps manufacturing adjust the loads on the lines so that no one cell gets overloaded, often by transferring several thousand pieces from one line to another. American Greetings is now beginning to apply the knowledge base to new manufacturing problems, such as determining the optimum layout for a given print run. The rules-driven application is helping the company reduce scrap by maximizing how much paper is used. Other rules help manufacturing avoid very specific problems, such as the tendency of a red illustration to "bleed" onto an adjacent white surface. |
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