Developing Common Operating Policies & Procedures

REM Associates of Princeton, Inc. recently completed a project with a major wallboard manufacturer with plants across the United States to implement improved warehousing and distribution policies and procedures. The program objectives were to improve facilities layout, capacity, and throughput for all wallboard manufacturing while maintaining distribution strategies for North America. The program began with an in-depth assessment of the facilities in order to prioritize effectiveness of the effort and maximize savings opportunities.

Assignment Objectives

• Determine facility capacities based on production scheduling, plant shut-down, and distribution
• Examine raw material and finished goods inventory levels to determine savings opportunities available
• Assess internal processes for movement of product to develop improvements and time savings opportunities
• Develop corporate and plant metrics for management to benchmark internal processes and competition

Key issues

• Developing systems and information to determine benchmarks and metrics for measurement and accuracy of procedures
• Creating facility layouts demonstrating improved product movement for storage and product distribution
• Illustrating production scheduling complexities with current MRP and DRP systems
• Developing activity based costing reports for SKU’s

Results

• Overall warehouse diagnostic reports by plant showing improvement opportunities based on unique manufacturing and facility design
• Created metrics and system to gather data to track, report, and store internal product movement metrics as well as benchmark to historical information and expected results
• WMS systems requirements based on current systems, interfaces, and future expectations
• SKU slotting design to minimize product movement and maximize efficiency
• ABC analysis and reports of inventory in total and by plant for unique SKU manufacturing

 

Copyright@2009, REM Associates of Princeton, Inc. 20 Nassau Street, Suite 244, PO Box 7345, Princeton, NJ 08543-7345. All rights reserved.