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Cut Cycle Time: One of the Top 10 Things Small and Medium-Sized Manufacturers Must Do
Admin December 5, 2016
In recent years consumers have seen the rise of convenience. This convenience is seen everywhere from the airport and fast food restaurants to grocery stores. In today’s consumer world, speed and convenience equates to great customer service. Consumers are willing to swipe, bag, or tag to get what they want faster. Consumers are saying ‘be gone’ with going to five different stores to get what they want, they want to go to one store (and store could mean a website like Amazon), get everything, get it fast and be done, often paying a small premium for that convenience. In the manufacturing world we call this cycle time.
Many of the most successful manufacturing customers of Global Shop Solutions focus on having a short cycle time and compressing the time between the sequences in your manufacturing. These successful manufacturing business have cut their cycle time, in some cases up to 50%, by automating processes such as purchasing and leveraging flex schedules with their manufacturing software.
The first step to cutting your cycle time and compressing sequences is understanding how your business actually works so you can identify weak points. These weak points can be virtually anything from the time it takes to print out a schedule to the actual physical placement of workcenters to reducing the time and distance material or employees travel to finish jobs. Every manufacturing company runs their business a little differently and cutting cycle time requires automation. Automation requires a manufacturing software package that can be customized through a software development kit like the Global Shop Solutions GAB SDK. Get what you want, when you want, how you want it, and fast.
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