APICS Michiana Presents -
Changing Shop Scheduling Techniques To Improve Cash Flows
Date: Tuesday, February 13, 2001
Joint Meeting with IMA

Bruce Shown, CPIM, CmfgE, CQE
For any company that wants to be very successful, short lead times should be a primary goal. Short lead times allow (actually require) less WIP and less finished goods inventories, lead to better cash flows, and most importantly, make for faster responses to customer needs. However, many shops cannot apply the classical just in time concepts to get short lead times since they aren’t really repetitive manufacturers. Their problem is how to improve product flow when many part numbers are only made a few times a year.

Bruce Shown faced this problem with his company’s supplier base of small medical job shops (9 to 300 employees). Several of these suppliers asked for specific techniques to use to improve flow in their job shops. This presentation covers the scheduling rules developed and the business outcomes of this collaboration. The results were spectacular for the shops that applied the principles. All of their business performance benchmarks improved simultaneously. No measure got worse.

However, critical to the success of the scheduling system is allowing it to work. And this requires a new way of thinking for accountants and other managers who are trying to measure the performance of their operations using traditional measures.

Wrong measures will force wrong actions. The result of wrong actions in the shop is longer lead times, deteriorating customer service and responsiveness, and poor cash flows.

Showing the connection between performance measures and poor cash flow may be the key to selling a change to the traditional performance measures.

Bruce Shown, CPIM, CmfgE, CQE began his manufacturing career in 1970 after four years as a ship officer with the U.S. Merchant Marine. He has worked in all areas of operations as a machine operator, foreman, plant superintendent, project coordinator in production control, quality manager, manufacturing engineer, business unit manager, and since 1996 in purchasing as the Manager of Supplier Development. Ongoing since 1997 he has served as project manager for a series of warehouse consolidation projects. Bruce is part of the Johnson and Johnson plant rationalization and consolidation committee for 29 plants in the United States and Europe.

Bruce is certified in Manufacturing Engineering, Production and Inventory Management, and Quality Engineering. He received an undergraduate degree at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy and completed his MBA at Indiana University in 1992.

He has spent the last 15 years with DePuy Orthopedics, a Johnson & Johnson Company. In his current role in supplier development, he helps DePuy suppliers by teaching techniques to reduce their lead times, assisting with process yield issues, and helping them solve processing problems. He is currently reducing backorders from international inter-company plants.

Agenda:
5:30 p.m. Networking, 6:15 p.m. Dinner, 7:15 p.m. Speaker
Cost:
20  for non-APICS Members, 15 APICS Members. 5 Student - ID Required
This session is worth 1 Certification Maintenance Point(s)
For Reservations: Call 574.217.0960 or EMail Reservations with the following information:
Your Name, Company Name, if employed, Address, email address (for our newsletter list), Phone Number, Number of people for whom you are making reservations, and their Names and email addresses.

To be held at:
Upper Deck, Coveleski Stadium

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