Major Challenge(s)
Limited Assembly space, Capacity Constraints, Lack of Portfolio level visibility for Management, Over 50 projects in progress at any point in time vying for common resources, Tracking over 100,000 bought-out parts across the portfolio
The targeted revenue was 25% higher than the past average using the same set of resources. On top of it, Management was facing last-minute surprises on almost every order and lack of due-date visibility meant poor commitment to customers
Solution Element(s)
Constraint-based pipelining of Portfolio, 2-Tier plans for projects, Concerto for leveraging methodology
The methodology and software was implemented in the project. The key differences that prior systems did not provide were:
Constraint based pipelining
A stable, reliable portfolio plan was created by pipelining every project on the basis of the Assembly Phase (constraint)
2-tier planning methodology
Simple and stable project plans of 30-40 Focus-&-Finish tasks, instead of 250-300 task traditional plans
Rigorous Full Kitting practice
8 FK points designed in every project to track availability of all bought-out material for every project and was integrated with SAP for automated tracking. Specific FK Manager appointed for monitoring FK readiness and controlling release of project in assembly
Forward-looking alerts
Portfolio/ project level forward-looking alerts for management meant pro-active actions. E.g. Concerto predicted Capacity shortage in Assembly 6 months in advance, allowing management to plan and execute some of the assemblies in situ and bring portfolio back in control
Results achieved by client
The management target of 25% was met within 8 months of implementation. The team is targeting to achieve another 15% improvement in the next fiscal year.
In FY 17-18 (April 17 to March 18), we had a very challenging target of increase in output by 25%. It had been very heartening that team Realization, our IT support team and our Operations team in MBD, we could meet the target of 25% increase in the throughput.
Concerto gave us alarms, flags, escalation of issues on which we promptly acted. The visibility allowed us to work smarter by adopting out of the box ideas to catch up with the plan. We continued with perseverance & maintained discipline and finally found the actual slowly converging with programme projections.
Prior to adopting Concerto, we were very apprehensive on the quantum of information we would be required to feed in the system, particularly duplication over the information we used to feed in SAP. Most pleasant surprise after its implementation had been the limited additional information which we have to update on the system and most of the data was directly linked from SAP.