June 1996 € Volume 6 € Number 6

Ryobi Powers Ahead To Operate With Reduced Cycle Times

In early 1994, officials at Ryobi Motor Products Corp. recognized that to continuously improve operations at their Pickens, S.C. site, they needed to find a system to provide real-time information on parts, downtime, labor and other areas vital to manufacturing. The plant's existing information system provided vast amounts of data, but not the real-time data required to reduce cycle times and keep the plant operating.

Ryobi Motor Products Corp. is a business unit of Ryobi North America, which is headquartered in Easley, S.C. The Pickens plant is a manufacturer and supplier of power tools sold under the Ryobi and Sears Craftsman names. Approximately 1,100 are employed at this manufacturing site.

To significantly reduce total inventories of raw materials, work-in-process and finished goods at the Pickens facility, Ryobi sought to dramatically compress manufacturing cycle time. In order to do this, the plant would have to improve its ability to schedule, monitor and coordinate both the direct and support activities that comprise the manufacturing cycle. Meeting these necessary conditions for reducing inventories required the plant to adopt real-time status reporting and finite capacity scheduling.

After several months of research and evaluation, Ryobi decided to implement a pilot system -- SynQuest MES. SynQuest is a Norcross, Ga.-based provider of software and service solutions. At the end of the pilot in August 1995, SynQuest MES was on target to contribute seven to eight percent in value-added improvements, which translates into enough money to pay for the system in one year, said Carl Klebe, director of manufacturing operations at the Pickens facility.

"The selling point for Ryobi on SynQuest MES is that it enabled us to model and evaluate our value-added path, which helped identify the improvements we're looking for in reducing cycle time," Klebe said.

Prior to implementing SynQuest MES software, the Pickens plant depended on manual information gathering and batch-oriented information system updating.

The SynQuest pilot and implementation were driven by a project team, along with technical support and pilot teams. Members determined the objectives of the pilot would be to: demonstrate in the Pickens working environment how SynQuest MES software would contribute to compressing the manufacturing cycle; indicate how implementation and training would work for a plantwide rollout; provide data and experience to verify estimates of cost, time and training required to implement SynQuest plantwide; and use the pilot results to quantify which implementation strategy would yield the best results.

Data from the pilot and the subsequent implementation has provided Ryobi with clear indicators of areas for improvement. For example, an analysis of data collected by SynQuest in one area of ferrous machining shows that some work orders can be idle 20 percent of the time after setup is completed. According to the data, most of the lag time is due to the availability of operators on shifts, availability of raw materials, conflicting priorities between work orders, and MRP demand that assumes infinite capacity. Specific procedures for using the SynQuest MES solution to reduce idle times are being developed by the Pickens plant and will be tested in the near future. "A reduction in idle time translates into a reduction in manufacturing cycle times," noted Klebe.

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"Little Hits, Not Home Runs" Has Helped Hufcor To Become An Industry Leader

When you're trying to stay on top in a non-growth industry, you have to look for innovative ways to beat out the competition. At Janesville, Wis.-based Hufcor, the secrets to success include a complete dedication to customer satisfaction, constant striving towards total quality, and a single-minded focus on being the lowest cost producer in the industry.

Hufcor, Inc., makes the operable, portable and accordion partitions and air walls that are used in hotels and conference facilities to temporarily reconfigure meeting facilities and ballrooms. As part of the construction industry, the partition business is subject to the ups and downs of hotel and convention center building cycles.

One of these periodic "down" cycles was so bad that Hufcor was forced to file for bankruptcy in 1979. Nevertheless, company president J. Michael Borden saw opportunity amid the difficulties. He observed that "Non-growth industries have non-growth industry thinkers who are reluctant to change. They lack creativity, fear variation and are satisfied where they are." Based on the belief that "in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king," Borden saw the seeds of future success.

Borden believes the leaders in an industry must set goals to reflect where they want to go and that is especially true in a non-growth industry. This belief is reflected in Hufcor's mission statement which reads in part "Hufcor will ... provide worldwide industry leadership through an obsession with customer satisfaction and business integrity ... product quality and innovation ..." It goes on to say that they " ... will dominate the worldwide operable, accordion, and portable partition market by the year 2000."

Hufcor has proven that it is serious. The company has grown more than 400 percent and its market share has gone from 15 percent in 1993 to 50 percent in 1995. Although the partition industry is shrinking 10-15 percent per year, Hufcor just completed another record year.

Hufcor now has a three-pronged strategy in place aimed at industry domination by the year 2000: zero defect quality; to be the low cost producer and the most profitable company in the industry; and to provide complete customer satisfaction.

With this strategy in mind, Hufcor redesigned the plant, moving the production area from one end of the facility to the other. In doing so, they re-organized the manufacturing process itself as a cellular flow facility, greatly reducing production lead time and increasing flexibility.

Among all of these changes, Hufcor management recognized the importance of information management as a key to achieving high customer satisfaction and improving quality while reducing costs. As their reorganization and improvement programs began to take effect, they realized that the systems they had in place at the time would not be able to support the new way of doing business so they initiated a systems modernization project.

Through a careful evaluation and selection effort, the company chose the IBM AS/400 and MAPICS software from Marcam Corp. The software selection team felt Marcam offered the best support and system knowledge, and they had the most confidence and trust in the group of people Marcam assigned to the project.

"Our (MAPICS) system is a strategic advantage for Hufcor. Having the right knowledge tools has helped control costs..." according to Steve Wolf, manager of MIS. Steve also points out "... customers can't believe the answers they can get, and so quickly."

At Hufcor, the business has been transformed through "lots of little hits, not home runs." And management is now achieved from the bottom up, not the top down. They have recognized the power available in the experience and dedication of the company's employees, and have tapped that power source to change Hufcor from a bankrupt also-ran to a world-class industry leader.

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