What’s possible:
Conventional Job Shops have been “bread and butter” for the TOC, worldwide, for 30 years. The opportunity for a major boost in profits (4X or better) is almost always present, TOC is the perfect tool to make it happen, and it isn’t difficult to make it a reality.
One of our clients set something like 36 months consecutive shipping records from essentially the same work force. Some colleagues of ours are working with a small Metal Fabrication shop in Colorado where after 5 years of breakeven or losing money, their 1st 6 months with TOC (including the “getting going” phase) enabled them to bank $300K Net Profit.
But we deal with some far more complicated and challenging environments, too.
One client offers a 5-day turnaround on a highly complex product in an environment where order volume is very high, order volume is highly variable, and EVERY order is unique.
For several years their competitor wasn’t even in their ball park for lead time or on-time delivery — because for more than 5 years these folks NEVER dropped below 98.5% on-time and were mostly in the 99.9% range. If that sounds like a story from the past, it is: the acquisition of an expensive computer system pushed them into a different way of working. Their performance plummeted. C’est la vie.
Another used to promise 10 day turnaround for their custom products and deliver mostly in 16 – 18 days, until they implemented TOC.
We took them to a state where they were promising 8 days and delivering in 6 … and sometimes in 5 or 4. While they increased their sales volume substantially. And again, EVERY order was unique and again, there was a high volume of orders and again, there was high variability in the order volume and the product mix.
This was a Canadian company. One of their customers was in the USA and reported that our client’s on-time performance was 98.7%. Their geographically closer supplier who was sort-of a competitor, had NEVER been better than 47% and their quoted lead time was substantially higher than our client’s. (But our client didn’t make the models they supplied with the material they wanted so they were stuck with them …)
TOC works beautifully in Job Shops, where every order is unique, the routings are unique, there are no standard times, and if a company took the time to build a BOM and Routing in their ERP system … well, the order should already have been produced and shipped. You have to keep it real.
TOC also works beautifully in environments where there might be days or even weeks of up-front custom engineering before the shop floor gets the chance to work on the product.
In most environments of this kind the product is already late by time it hits the shop floor and production is a nightmare of chronic expediting. We can apply a unique form of project management to the front end of this type of work that typically shrinks the engineering time and means the factory has ample time to perform its work with no juggling of priorities.
Sceptical?
Of course you should be. But we can back this up.
Does this interest you?
If this interests you, and you’d like to explore it more to validate it genuinely applies to your business, your products, your circumstances,
Call Steve Jackson or Rod Gelhorn at: 604 – 668 – 3253.