At noon that day, Niu Xiaobai convened a meeting with all production foremen, engineers and planners in the conference room of the machine shop to discuss how to reduce the inventory level of work-in-progress.
Niu Xiaobai made the opening remarks of this meeting straight to the point: “Dear colleagues, since we last took control measures, the output of each process has been matched with the bottleneck process. In this way, our work-in-process
Inventory levels have declined and have basically returned to the previous level. However, this is far from enough. Just yesterday, General Manager Chen put forward higher requirements for us, asking us to reduce the level of work-in-progress inventory as much as possible.
The company saves valuable cash flow.”
Jiang Hui looked at Niu Xiaobai in embarrassment and said: "Manager Niu, our work-in-progress inventory cannot be too small. Do you know? The work-in-progress inventory has a very good buffering effect: when a piece of equipment needs to be shut down for maintenance or
When a malfunction occurs, or when workers take leave, or parts are of poor quality, etc., maintaining an appropriate inventory of work-in-progress can prevent these problems from affecting normal production and allow production to continue as planned. You see, this is not the case
Is it good?"
Niu Xiaobai did not answer Jiang Hui's question immediately, but drew a picture on the whiteboard: On a river with high water, a sailboat was sailing smoothly. It seemed that everything was going smoothly, but there were countless hidden things hidden at the bottom of the river.
of the reef.
Niu Xiaobai pointed to the river in the painting and said to Jiang Hui: "Xiao Hui, look, this river is like our work-in-progress inventory, and the reefs under the river are like the problems you just mentioned. In order to ensure that the river
For the sailboat above to be able to pass smoothly, a large amount of river water is needed to cover all the reefs under the river. When you say "buffer", I would rather say "cover" instead. In order to cover up the real equipment of the production line
Failures, staff shortages, poor quality parts and other issues force us to maintain a large inventory of work-in-progress for a long time."
Jiang Hui made a face and smiled: "I think this is good! Look, with a lot of river water, this sailboat will never be in danger of hitting the rocks and sinking. How safe are the passengers on this sailboat?
! Manager Niu, didn’t you say safety first? Haha!”
Niu Xiaobai also smiled and continued to explain: "The statement that safety comes first is correct. But in this case, the river water in nature is free. Relatively speaking, the more river water, the safer navigation is; back to us
The actual situation in the machine shop is that work-in-progress inventory is free. If there is too much work-in-process inventory, I think it will cause at least two problems: On the one hand, our monthly work-in-process inventory level is basically maintained at one hundred
About 10,000, which is equivalent to ten days of output in our machine processing workshop, seriously backlogging the company's precious funds; on the other hand, the excessively high work-in-progress inventory conceals the
Overriding the urgency of the problem, people don’t have much motivation to solve the fundamental problem. As a result, the problem remains there and even gets worse.”
Tang Cheng, the production engineer sitting next to Jiang Hui, sighed: "Sometimes it's not that our engineers don't want to solve the problem as soon as possible, but it takes a while to solve the problem. If there is no work-in-progress inventory, then once something goes wrong
Problem, the entire production line is shut down, and our production engineers are under too much pressure."
Hu Xiuping crossed his arms, looked at Tang Cheng sideways, and said disdainfully: "We haven't even started a war yet, and you're surrendering? The soldiers will stop you, and the water will flood you! If you find a problem, just solve it. Are you afraid?"
What? Manager Niu, tell us about the quantified target value. What level do you want to reduce the work-in-progress inventory to? Let’s all add up and figure out what we should do.”
Niu Xiaobai gave Hu Xiuping a thumbs up: "Haha! Mr. Hu, you are on to the point! It is very necessary to quantify the target value. Only in this way can everyone clearly understand the goal of action and the gap between reality and the goal.
What exactly is there? Sometimes, even a goal that seems difficult to quantify can actually be quantified through certain conversions. For example, I saw a smart service staff in the mobile phone business hall."
It is said that a rich man went to a mobile phone store to recharge his phone bill. The waitress inside asked: "How much do you want to recharge?" The rich man replied domineeringly: "Please fill it up!"
The service lady was stunned and said with a gentle smile: "How old are you this year?" The wealthy man said: "I am 30!"
The service lady took out the calculator and said while calculating: "Your current package's minimum consumption per month is 158 yuan, which is 1896 yuan per year... Well, you look healthy. I believe you will live a long life."
Years old, so there are still 70 years to pay, a total of 132,720 yuan...Look, do you pay by card or cash?"...
People here couldn't help laughing after hearing this joke told by Niu Xiaobai. It seems that there are risks in society, so you need to be careful when pretending to be cool, and you shouldn't say anything that sounds cool.
Niu Xiaobai waited until everyone was laughing, and then continued: "General Manager Chen requires that our machine shop can only keep about four days of work-in-progress inventory, which means a maximum of 400,000 yuan."
Jiang Hui stuck out her tongue and said with an incredulous expression: "It is necessary to reduce 60% of the work-in-progress inventory all at once. Isn't this too difficult?"
Several production foremen also felt a little discouraged, "Is this possible?" "That's right! It took a lot of effort to reduce it a little bit in the past few days, but now it's even more severe, and it has to be reduced so much. How is this possible?"...
…
Everyone
These doubts mentioned were also doubts in Niu Xiaobai's heart. After having an in-depth communication with Leng Shi, Niu Xiaobai already had the answer in his heart.
Niu Xiaobai calmly drew a dozen boxes on the whiteboard and wrote the names of each process in the machine shop in each box. He motioned for everyone to be quiet, and then explained in an orderly manner: "
Dear friends, you may not know that the production model we are using now is called push production. Traditionally, manufacturing companies generally adopt push production models."
In the push production mode, production control is to ensure that tasks are completed on time, quality, and quantity according to the requirements of the production operation plan. Employees in each process focus on the production efficiency of their own process.
The planning department decomposes the production plan of the final product based on market demand, communicates the corresponding production tasks and lead times to each production department, and finally refines it into the input-output plan of each component and the corresponding ordering plan.
For each department, production needs to be organized according to the plan. After the production is completed, the actual completion status will be reported to the planning department, and the finished products will be sent to the next production department. Therefore, the overall production method is a kind of initial production from the process
The process of "pushing" the department to the final production department of the process.
"Our Fuma Company has been using this production method for many years. Is there any problem?" Hu Hongxiang, the production foreman, asked strangely.
Niu Xiaobai explained: "Everyone, in the push production model, each process is independent of each other. The previous process will not consider the actual digestion capacity of the next process; each process does its best according to its own production plan.
We can produce as efficiently as possible and complete production tasks as soon as possible, regardless of whether the next process is needed at that time. Therefore, the inventory level of work-in-progress in the entire production system is generally relatively large."
The push production model cannot meet the requirements of just-in-time production. If the push production model has been adopted and at the same time it is necessary to ensure that all products can be delivered on time, then the delivery dates for the production of all products and product-decomposed parts must be
, to carry out complete and accurate calculations. This requires the introduction of a large amount of data, such as the time when the equipment changes molds, the precise production time of each component... This kind of calculation itself requires a large amount of manpower and material resources.
Moreover, if an abnormal situation occurs, the entire production plan must be revised and adjusted, such as arranging emergency feeding, inserting orders, or personnel working overtime to ensure that the task can be completed on time, but these adjustment measures are costly
of the price.
"Manager Niu, what you mentioned has become our normal situation. Is there any way we can change it?" Jiang Hui asked curiously, obviously she was very interested in this topic.