Lean Customer Drives Lean Features

User Solutions worked with the NIST (NIST is a non-regulatory federal agency within the U.S. Department of Commerce. NIST's mission is to promote U.S. innovation and industrial competitiveness by advancing measurement science, standards, and technology in ways that enhance economic security and improve our quality of life) Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) on a project to support Instruments for Industry (IFI), a Long Island-based electronics assembly company committed to Lean Manufacturing.

As a result, Resource Manager-DB was adapted to support Lean Manufacturing principles. Orca Technical Services, a subsidiary of IFI, is now a Distributor for the product, utilizing an actual live environment as part of an East Coast Training Center for Resource Manager-DB. According to Robert Krause, MRP Specialist for IFI, “In my 20 years of working with MRP and Inventory Systems, it’s refreshing to work with a product that is so open and flexible to support our initiatives.” Robert continues, “While the whole purpose of Lean Manufacturing is to reduce systems – you still need a system for managing the Purchasing and parts of the business that are not appropriate for Lean Manufacturing Techniques. Resource Manager-DB does this and fully utilizes KanBan Control, automated KanBan signal replenishment, supports the Front/Back bin, Point of Use principles and is fully Bar Code enabled.”

Lean Fast for GE Wind Energy

GE Power Systems, Wind Energy Division, is starting up a new plant for producing the next generation of windmill blades in Pensacola Florida. According to Jeff Henning, CPIM, Master Scheduler, “We were looking for a material tracking system that could be operational in a very short period of time, while providing the necessary planning tools and reports of much larger and costlier systems”.

Mr. Henning and his team selected a multi-user version of Resource Manager-DB after they sent sample data via e-mail and User Solutions demonstrated, with web conferencing, the capabilities of the system to quickly import in existing Bills-Of-Material from Excel. Jeff continues, “We are pleased with the flexibility Resource Manager-DB has to import/export data as well as the thoughtfully designed inventory management screens. In addition the barcode reader interface with Excel-based reporting provided us with an easy to use, yet robust management system in less than one week's implementation time. We also needed a system that required very little start-up training and we have found that operators feel very comfortable with the layout and the user-friendly Excel based outputs.”


Quick Implementation and Solid Benefits

The GE Team requested the system be implemented in less than two weeks after their order. With the initial data used during the Web Conference, User Solutions and Orca Technical delivered a complete system, including Palm-Pilot Bar Code Scanners, in just a few days. According to Jeff Henning, “The implementation was much faster than we expected and was customized to meet our needs in a lean manufacturing environment. The consultant was very knowledgeable and helped us tailor the system quickly to incorporate the point-of-use Kanban process we desired.” In summary, Jeff reports “The key benefits to us have been Excel based reports that make data mining extremely easy, barcode reading that simplifies data capture, and electronic signaling for material reorder or stockroom replenishment using a simple e-mail process”.