Improving Operations and Quoting Accurate Lead Times in a Laminate Plant

The important requirement of quoting short and accurate lead times to customers in industrial supply chains is a difficult challenge as it requires coordination between purchasing, order-entry, scheduling and inventory-control groups. We meet this challenge at a laminate plant where the customer demands (in timing and quantity) are variable, the production processes have uncertain yield, the variety of products is high, and manufacturing involves significant switch-over costs and times between products—through the use of inventory management with cyclic scheduling, along with many concurrent improvements in supplier management, customer relations, product design, and quality.