March 1996 € Volume 6 € No. 3
Synchronizing a Smooth Landing
By Julie Fraser
It's the post-Cold War era, and the aircraft market has slowed down considerably.
In addition, the customers are much more demanding. Aircraft parts used
to be measured on quality, price and delivery date, in that order. Now,
quality is a given, and a plant that does not have good prices and quick
delivery is quickly eliminated as a supplier.
This is a totally new set of business rules: A plant that was focused on
quality must shift the balance to achieve rapid delivery at a good price.
How can a company accommodate this dramatic change in the environment and
remain competitive? Heroux Inc. of Longueuil, Quebec, Canada, manufactures,
repairs and remanufactures complex landing gear for aircraft. Picking up
on the concept of manufacturing synchronization, this company decided it
needed an easy-to-use information system that would produce accurate daily
schedules for their remanufacturing plant.
The challenge is that their's is a very complex process for remanufacturing.
Until the product arrives, they don't know what they need to do to refurbish
it. Routings are created after an analysis process, and every routing may
be different, depending on the condition and problems of the incoming landing
gear. The remanufacturing process includes 30 to 40 operations. The plant
has 60,000 open work orders in the database.
It's also a very complex product. Aircraft landing gear have a BOM that
is nine to 11 levels deep! So even if all of the machines, tools, and people
are available to work on the landing gear, there's a good chance that not
all of the subassemblies and raw materials a given order requires are available.
Few products can synchronize in such a complex environment. Heroux chose
MOOPI Manufacturing Synchronization software from Berclain to bring together
the activities of the plant floor with the enterprise systems to ensure
accurate delivery of customer orders.
After about nine months incorporating MOOPI into their business operations,
Heroux dramatically improved its ability to deliver customer orders for
remanufactured landing gears on time. Backlog was reduced by 35 percent.
On-time delivery performance increased by more than 30 percent. Cycle time
was cut by 30 percent after the first eight months on a specific contract.
And while the volume of new jobs in the plant increased by 139 percent,
WIP increased by only 61 percent.
Julie Fraser is vice president, market strategy, for Berclain Group
Inc., a provider of detailed scheduling and manufacturing synchronization
software. She was formerly senior industry analyst at AMR, following plant
floor applications.
Copyright © 2020 by the American Production and Inventory
Control Society Inc. All rights reserved.
Click here
to return to the table of contents.