Incoplan - Catalyst to Lean Manufacturing - Part II

2 INCOPLAN

Incoplan is a finite scheduling solution, focuses on key areas across the organization. Though, the main objective remains the ‘effective and efficient’ management of manufacturing activities, it supports virtually all functions playing an important role in ‘internal supply chain’.


Lean manufacturing concept defines the system fat as ‘waste’, whereas Incoplan identifies this as ‘unproductive’ part of the system. Incoplan has been, naturally focusing on reduction/minimization/elimination of this ‘unproductive’ part, which is nothing but elimination of ‘waste’.

The core concept of Incoplan is:

Incoplan is a unique scheduling solution which encompasses agility, technology and flexibility to deliver best-fit solution with Value, Speed and Stability.

Incoplan attacks on all aspects of the ‘internal supply chain’ to maximize the global result. This also ensures good local results as well. It also provides a lot of flexibility to accommodate and model varying nature of the business process requirements arising out of numerous factors, even some are of external nature. This allows any organization to create a strong control over the chain and achieve best possible results.

It is interesting to note that Incoplan has been a result of many years of extensive research. The core design and business functionality of Incoplan creates a strong coherence with dynamic and strategic requirements of organization.

Incoplan provides strength and vision to build optimum production system, while managing leading techno-concepts right from creating value stream, Lean Manufacturing to Advanced Planning and Scheduling.

Typical building blocks of Incoplan solution are:


Let us try to understand the main areas related to manufacturing activities, which are potential candidate for generating waste or non-productive task/output. This also means, these areas are the ‘attack’ areas for Incoplan.

The typical manufacturing activities of industrial organization can be illustrated by the following example:


Considering the main focus area of scheduling solution, there are different functional areas where the standard concept of lean manufacturing would be applicable. With development of lean concept, it has established more or less standard check points to look for waste minimization. These check points many time addresses to a set of parameters, which needs to be evaluated.

A close observation through the process flow and business constraints reveals the ‘critical decision areas’, wherein the gain probability is higher. Incoplan adheres to and strategically manages these ‘critical decision areas’ to impart the systematic and continuous benefits to the organizations.

A. LEAN SCHEDULING

Incoplan manages entire manufacturing domain for planning and scheduling aspects. In addition, it also provides a strong decision support and specific analytical data to relevant connected functional divisions.
In fact, Incoplan in real sense, manages complete ‘internal supply chain’. This allows user to build a global, closely held business process to establish role, responsibility and accountability towards common objectives / business goals.

In this section, we will have an overview to find out more about Incoplan as a lean scheduling solution and in the next section, we will deal with specific examples to highlight natural strength of the solution.

How Incoplan derives and builds ‘Lean Scheduling’:

I - VALUE STREAM MAPPING

Value stream mapping focuses on process to build the product, following it from the beginning to the end of the production. Incoplan has modeling capability to divide the complete process chain into small and measurable tasks to create a systematic work flow. A very simple example is:

One product requires say two [2] days as total production cycle time, whereas the product is actually delivered in say seven [7] days after the order commitment. A careful observation would state that additional five [5] days are the potential candidate to be treated as ‘system fat’ or ‘waste’.

The realistic reason, why it is very difficult to have same values for these two parameters is current production load and process constraints including unpredictable events.

Incoplan always try to minimize this time gap. It always has ‘look forward’ approach to ensure that any local optimum change is not affecting the global symptoms. Therefore, Incoplan recognizes local level and global level process parameters to manage the complete manufacturing link in a streamline manner.

II - STREAMLINE FLOW

The entire flow line is a visible evidence to measure the ‘health indicator’ of the system. It is important to have small and measurable task across the flow and identification of pain areas. The ideal example would be a flow of water stream. Two classic attributes of the flow of water stream are: continuity and streamline.

In manufacturing environment, ideal flow is ‘one piece’ flow. It is feasible to build ‘piece-by-piece’ process flow in Incoplan. There are a few key aspects, which may cause a global effect on overall performance, if strictly ‘one piece’ flow is followed. For example, in a batch production or process environment, wherein setup times are much higher compare to execution or run time, it would be appropriate to produce in batch. Still one can achieve the core objective of ‘one piece’ flow mechanism.

This is what Incoplan is capable off. It has enormous strength to model multiple parameters and process flow constraints to derive the process model suitable to work environment, while adhering to the principals of manufacturing practices.

In general, routings with necessary details, production constraints and setup times are most important criterions, which defines and derives the best possible way for achieving a ‘streamline flow’ as equivalent to ‘water stream’.

III - PULL PRODUCTION

The standard pull production system aims at minimizing ‘work-in-progress’ [WIP] through all levels of process. In an ideal pull system, in-process inventory at each stage is one unit. Pull system environment can be described as: when demand for the preceding stage’s output is generated by the succeeding stage, the preceding stage’s unit of inventory is transferred to the succeeding stage.

The ideal pull system with one unit of inventory at each stage may not be achievable in a real manufacturing system, where a variation in processing time, imbalance of workloads between stages, demand fluctuation and machine breakdown are inevitable.

The process modeling of Incoplan enables to group similar type of production tasks and maintain the pull production characteristics as ‘one-unit’ flow. This allows not only adhering to the base concepts, which eliminates un-necessary work-in-progress but also having similar units moving together, which gives advantage to absorb deviations in the process and resource parameters.

IV - KAIZEN

One this is always constant in any environment and that is change. It is important to understand the change and act accordingly to improve the global performance. The word kaizen is normally linked with ‘event’. An event signifies a short time period. It is important to note that when any event in a system changes, the path to improvement changes quite frequently.

Incoplan solution has ‘smart intelligence’ to read, understand and map any process or short term change of event and deliver the new solution in short time. In fact, it has the ability to map and solve the problem without affecting the core data. This essentially forms the learning with ‘cause and effect’ analysis of the system.

In addition, Incoplan allows a quick support for ‘what-if’ analysis, which is nothing but a good analytical tool to have continuous learning and improvement.
To make a synopsis, Incoplan –

• Creates a business organization model
• Accepts planned requirements
• Establishes production profile
• Work with business objectives and process constraints
• Generate ‘best-fit’ production schedule
• Manage ‘change’ across entire chain and provide quick analysis