Best practices
Freeing yourself from bureaucracy
Giving teams autonomy
Facilitating decision-making
Watch the conversation between Michael Valentin of OPEO and Thibaut Wilhelm of Oplit from which this article is taken
With the goal of taking a 360° look at industrial production planning, Michael Valentin, managing partner at OPEO, takes stock with Thibaut Wilhelm, CEO of Oplit, of the various operational needs and focus areas of today's manufacturers.
Some things are classic things but that nevertheless remain extremely important.
The first is how to free yourself from bureaucracy. This is not specific to industrial production planning, but still.
I have seen nearly two hundred and fifty sites since the beginning of my career. Each time, I like to spend time with the planners and schedulers. These are professions that I find fascinating, that are truly at the heart of all manufacturing.
And these people, it is just incredible what they have in their heads. They have a whole host of things that they cannot put down on paper, but only they know them. So there is an enormous mental load because of all the constraints linked to manufacturing and the constraints that come from customers and products. And on top of that, they are generally not helped by their tools. They are the world champions of Excel pivot tables.
They have to cross-reference the data that comes from the ERP, that sometimes comes from the MES, that sometimes comes from files made by quality, because there were delays and action plans to catch up. In short, it is hell.
Even recently, I met a planner in luxury who worked in a tannery, and in fact the main pain point, admittedly, was obviously to improve the site's competitiveness, but it was also to free her from these tasks, because since these are rare resources, and if you do not do something to make these people feel better in their shoes, you take the risk that they throw in the towel, that they go elsewhere or that they change profession.
So retaining these resources is extremely important. Fostering the transmission of their knowledge as well, and to do that, you absolutely have to equip them much more. And with digital and solutions like Oplit, there are tools that make it possible to do this.
Then, the second subject concerns the autonomy of the teams, notably on the production side. Quite simply, the priority must be clear, for everyone and at every moment, and potentially the organization should happen on its own, the teams should be agile.
And the last operational point is the facilitation of decision-making, at all levels. It is optimizing a sequence, knowing that a given product is going to arrive quickly and that I will not have set up my machine because it is at the upstream station just before and will arrive in an hour. It is knowing that I am going to have a wall of load in two or three months and that I have to recruit people. It is knowing that a given order or a given customer has become urgent, and is a fast track.
It is all these things that truly make it possible to optimize the site's performance. But the key to success is that the decision can be made as low as possible. The organizations that malfunction on this point are the organizations where all the decisions are made at the top, being too far from the constraints of the field and the realities of what is experienced by the operators at the machines.
You have to facilitate (and digital is a great vehicle for this) decision-making so that it is made right at the bottom and so that people are aware of what is going to happen to them in a week or tomorrow. And if you do not have the right management rules, then everyone organizes locally, which is logical and intelligent, except that you do not optimize globally.
So ensuring that decisions are made correctly, at the right level, that they are shared and collaborative, is an enormous stake in manufacturers' production planning.
And having good shop-floor flow rules can help a lot. Limiting work-in-progress by doing just-in-time is a good option. Now, with digital and CONWIP systems, this makes it possible to ensure that you operate at stable work-in-progress. And then everything is much easier to manage because you make decisions on potentialities that are not as exponential as if you let in all the work-in-progress, because otherwise there would be so many possible options that everyone would be lost.
