Resources

Combatting the Last Mile Problem

Kevin Argudin addresses the “symptoms” of the Last Mile Problem, in which facilities’ internal scheduling  tries to understand their supply and demand at the highest level, but because of a missing link scheduling becomes a gruelling task. He advises how to combat these symptoms and make scheduling an effective, simple task with the assistance of Product Wheels.

Improving Throughput Inefficiency

Mac Jacob draws on personal experience to explain how Product Wheels were born from throughput inefficiency. He outlines how with the use of this process, a project’s operating efficiency increased exponentially and scheduling issues within the production plant were solved. In addition, he describes a situation that was using an irrelevant strategy, why it was and the solution that this process provided – taking a problem that seemed to be without a fix and describes where the resolution was found.

Driving Multi-Functional Collaboration

How often in your organization do your efforts take a backseat to those of another team? Conflicts between teams can be detrimental to the success of a company or project. Jeanne Reisinger describes how to “break-through” this friction, and how to bring functions together to accomplish the common goal at hand.

Leveraging Your Supply Chain as a Weapon

Are supply chains a competitive point of difference? If so, how do you best leverage them to your advantage? In our latest podcast, “Leveraging Your Supply Chain as a Weapon.” Warren Sarafinchan describes why this is not only true, but what else supply chains offer companies and how to fine-tune the process to best assist your business.

How to Keep Up With the Pace of Change in Your Industry

Jeanne Reisinger brings great insight to why a Digitization Strategy is critical when trying to keep up with change. She highlights and describes key elements that must be “perfected” to effectively account for change, the most important of which are Technology, Implementation, and Leadership. Listen to the newest addition to our resources page to learn more.

Product Wheels: A Powerful Solution to the Biggest Production Scheduling Challenges

Improve or eliminate ongoing production scheduling challenges that often cause inefficiencies and limit throughput improvement. Experience stability and predictability with your schedule; Discover Product Wheels. This narrated video provides an overview of the issues Product Wheels help companies to overcome and why it’s a powerful solution to consider for improving your production scheduling.

A Proven Strategy to Improve Efficiency, Capacity, and Throughput

Unlike typical “solutions”, Product Wheel Scheduling incorporates a holistic view of your products and processes to address underlying challenges in production scheduling. Learn more about Product Wheels in this brief video.

When Product Wheel based scheduling strategies are paired with Phenix Planning and Scheduling, a cloud-based tool to support all plant scheduling needs, companies can systemically and simplistically manipulate their resources, while proactively producing reproducible and productive manufacturing schedules. Bridging planned orders to real world resource capabilities allows schedulers to make and support good business decisions and eliminate firefighting.

Phenix can stand alone to maximize resource utilization and “right-first-time” performance for simple plant processes. Additionally, Phenix has proven essential as more sophisticated scheduling approaches are used, such as Product Wheels. The benefits gained by improving manufacturing scheduling will continue to be achieved only when the scheduling process becomes systemic to your operating model. Tools that support ease of model maintenance and schedule changes are essential to ensure sustained effectiveness. Product Wheels and Phenix allows your company to do this. Learn more.

For more information, download the Manufacturing Effectiveness Toolkit. This toolkit contains the details you need to better understand Product Wheels and the many ways they could benefit your company.

The insider approach to supply chain mastery

Jeanne Reisinger, Global Supply Chain Improvement Strategist, demonstrates how an integrative improvement approach can enable your people to deliver supply chain excellence. She explores how, given the right structures and problem-solving tools, your workforce will naturally enhance its own business processes on a day-to-day basis, and bring improvements to bear in ways never imagined possible.

Watch the video

What’s in a great global supply chain?

Jeanne Reisinger, Global Supply Chain Improvement Strategist, provides her version of what a world-class global supply network looks like. Describing some of the challenges faced by organizations today, she demonstrates how an integrative improvement approach can help you seize and maintain high-level competitiveness.

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10 Years After: How Close Are We to True Demand-Driven Supply Chains?

It’s been about a decade since companies began entertaining the dream of a truly “demand-driven” supply chain. How far have we come? Roddy Martin, Managing Director of Accenture Supply Chain Strategies at the time of this recording, a Zinata Advisor and currently VP of Supply Chain at Oracle, provides a progress report.

Best Practices in Supply-Chain Transformation

What does it take to be the best? Roddy Martin, Managing Director of Accenture Consulting at the time of this recording, Zinata Advisor and currently VP of Supply Chain at Oracle, identifies the latest leadership trends and relates what companies are doing to achieve demand-driven transformation in their supply chains.

Better Planning and Scheduling with the Right Stock Levels

Editor’s Note: Peter L. King, CSCP, is the author of the 2011 article “Crack the Code,” which is still one of our digital magazine’s most popular stories. The following article is written as a response to the many questions readers have asked about the original article and to help take the topic of mastering inventory management a step further.

This article is provided with permission of the Association of Supply Chain Management from the October-December 2020 issue of SCM Now. Copyright©2021 Association of Supply Chain Management. All rights reserved.

Product Wheels Power Production

Pete L. King and Alan H. Nall joined forces to write an article, recently published in ISE Magazine which features product wheels, where they answer all of your questions with great detail as well as with high expertise and precision. The article describes what product wheels are, the design process, real world examples, and the benefits of product wheel, including their incredible stability and consistency when it comes to productivity and scheduling within your plant.

This article is provided with permission of the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers from the October 2018 issue of ISE, Copyright©2018 Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers. All rights reserved.

Machine Learning + Statistical Forecasting = Faster Response

Machine learning with statistical forecasting results in a more responsive and customer-centric supply chain. With 30+ years in supply chain consulting and management, Carol McIntosh has applied her experience and knowledge to support companies in various industries such as pharmaceutical and consumer packaged goods with their forecasting and demand planning. See her latest article published by the Institute of Business Forecasting & Planning.

This is hard! What do you need to consider to drive a successful Supply Chain transformation?

Supply chain transformation presents a complex “change” challenge, for you cannot approach it from one point of view only. You need multiple diagnostic lenses in order to see what is happening and to strategize the best way forward. The SCGuideStar team, drawing on comprehensive research and thought leadership in supply chain and organization/leadership transformation, honed five lenses for the transformational leader to look through in order to see deeply into what is happening within his/her business. This study and report was created by Roddy Martin: VP of Supply Chain at Oracle, formerly AMR/Gartner, Accenture and Zinata Advisor; Pat McLagan, leadership and transformation expert and Zinata Business Partner; and Don Wirth, of Zinata and former head of Global Supply Chain, DuPont.

Reinventing the (product) wheel – Scheduling strategy makes for better flow

This article is adapted from The Product Wheel Handbook – Creating Balanced Flow in Multi- Product Process Operations by Peter L. King and Jennifer S. King, © 2013 Productivity Press.

Wheel of Fortune APICS 2017 Presentation

This presentation was given at the 2017 APICS conference by Peter L. King and Alan H. Nall

APICS 2017 Cover Story – Product Wheels

This article is a copy of the article printed in 2017 APICS magazine by Peter L. King and Alan H. Nall

The Phenix Scheduler

Today’s Reality and What the Future Could Look Like

Are you striving to improve efficiency while dealing with constant changes in the schedule?

Are you manually creating your production schedules or using tools not designed for your purpose?

Interested in seeing if Phenix Planning and Scheduling – a cloud based extension to Product Wheels – is the answer that your company has been searching for? For more information download the product description and/or visit phenixps.com

Product Wheel Scheduling Assessment

Could you experience a 35% increase in throughput or save millions in labor costs? Could you overcome major scheduling issues in your manufacturing?

Find out if you could experience these kinds of benefits as a result of implementing Product Wheels. This assessment narrows in on the most common areas Product Wheels can make an impact, and takes less than 5 minutes to complete. Our team of experts will review your responses and get back to you within 2 days with your results and suggested next steps.

Complete the Product Wheel Scheduling Assessment.