Quick Response Manufacturing – It’s About Time!
If you are working in an environment where you product or service range means you have to offer lots of complexity and low volumes to your customers, then you probably struggle to see how traditional Lean approaches work for you. You may well have tried to implement Lean already, with limited success and often considerable frustration. Quick Response Manufacturing (QRM) is a powerful and radical new approach – applied enterprise wide – that helps organisations improve customer service and reduce cost, by focussing on the goal of reducing lead times.
The concept of Quick Response Manufacturing (QRM) was first developed in the late 1980s by Rajan Suri, at the time professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 2010, Suri’s book ‘It’s About Time: The Competitive Advantage of Quick Response Manufacturing’ was published. It’s a superb guide on how to implement the principles of QRM, but be assured, it challenges almost every paradigm you might have about running an efficient and productive manufacturing company!
QRM strategy comprises of 4 core concepts:
- The power of time
Many hidden costs within a business are driven by long lead-times. Typical symptoms include excess inventories, planning difficulties, expediting costs, overtime, quality issues and so on. The result is often dissatisfied customers and a stressed workforce.
By visualising the lead-time clearly and using one overriding measure to drive it down, the organisation will have clarity on its strategic goal and avoid confusion around conflicting objectives.
The overriding measure is MCT – Manufacturing Critical path Time: ‘the typical amount of calendar time from when a customer creates an order, through the critical path, until the first pieces of that order is delivered to the customer.’
- Organization structure
The traditional focus on Resource efficiency has driven a high degree of specialisation into many organizations. Lead-time can become extended as a result, due to inflexibility (e.g. specialised equipment that suffers long changeover times, or specialised personnel that can only perform a narrow range of tasks – and frequently have long queues in front of them). In fast moving production environments, the ‘bottleneck’ process often moves, so inflexible mass production systems are not the answer here.
QRM Cells overcome this through a high degree of cross-training and autonomy, promoting flexibility for resources to move to where the workload currently is. QRM promotes Flow efficiency underpinned by additional capacity to keep the job moving, rather than holding additional inventory and applying Pull systems.
- System Dynamics
Lead-time is related to capacity utilisation, demand variability and lot sizing. High utilisation is great for resource Efficiency, but damages Flow – think about this by comparing driving along a motorway at rush hour (highly utilised), to driving along the same road in the middle of the night! The Kingsman Equation / Curve is a well-known model that illustrates this phenomenon.
It is crucial therefore to maintain spare capacity in the system – to enable smooth Flow of Value – to absorb variability in demand and protect lead-time reduction.
System dynamics will help managers to understand the impact that utilisation and variability have on lead-time, and how even a small investment in additional capacity can generate a significant lead-time improvement.
The higher your utilization, the longer your queue is. Also, the higher your variation the longer your queue is.
- Enterprise wide application
QRM is not just a shop-floor focused approach. Functions such as order processing, new product introduction, purchasing and supply chain management can all have a significant impact on the overall lead-time experienced by the customer. Office based QRM Cells can apply the same lead-time reduction philosophy to their processes to contribute to reduction in overall lead-time. As with any change management process, clarity of the goal and its benefits are essential to communicate. Remember, QRM is driven by the goal of lead-time reduction, to which all aspects of the business can contribute.
Quick Response Manufacturing applies to every aspect of an organisation, is singular in its focus and simple to understand – generating competitive advantage through relentless reduction of lead-time.
At Lean FSL Associates we have successfully used QRM principles in conjunction with Glenday Sieve and the Green Stream / Red Stream approach (See the dedicated section on this in our Tools area) to focus on improvements in the 20% of Sales Volume that often represents the ‘long tail’ of products by volume. We can help you with the analysis required to take advantage of this powerful approach, and have years of experience of redesigning shopfloor systems and support functions to deliver the impressive results QRM can deliver. See our Case Studies section to see how we successfully implemented this approach at a subsidiary Precision Engineering division of Pexion Group.