Business Excellence: The Integrated Solution to Planning and Control [Paperback]

In short : recommended, down to earth reading for both students and practitioners in manufacturing without the evangelistic hype that too often accompanies terms such as "business excellence".

- The 1998 edition has more on how to increase flexibility in production including annualised hours, improving supplier performance including Vendor Managed Inventory, more on sales forecasting, variety reduction, faster implementation. - - The book has chapters on -: - Business planning - Sales and Operations Planning - Master Production Scheduling - Material Requirements Planning - Capacity Requirements Planning - Purchasing - Data Accuracy - Manufacturing Control Traditional and Kanban - Continuous Improvement Techniques - Bill of Material and Design Issues - Performance Measures and Implementation. There is a Jargon Buster in the appendix and a Software Selection Guide for anyone contemplating purchasing a manufacturing planning system.

With Knowles Phil developed their business processes using JIT, Total Quality, Juran Quality and other Continuous Improvement techniques. He was one of the first, if not the first, to implement Kanbans using bar code and EDI first within Knowles in the UK then between Knowles sites in the USA and Taiwan and finally between Knowles and its customers. Phil became Director of Manufacturing at Knowles and was finally promoted to Director of Marketing.

In the ten years since starting the Business Excellence programme, Knowles had achieved a class "A" MRP II implementation, improved lead times from 8 weeks to a next day close out on Kanban deliveries, reduced inventories by one third despite increased turnover, achieved a better than 99.5% on time delivery record and reduced customer returns to under 300 parts per million.

In addition to individual consulting work, Phil now teaches the Business Excellence Fundamentals and World Class Manufacturing courses as well as specialist classes for MRP Ltd.

Phil has a degree in Electrical Engineering, is a member of the Institute of Managers and an associate member of the Institute of Electrical Engineers.

What is your company trying to achieve?

Lower Cost?

Higher Quality?

More responsive to customers?

To achieve any one of these objectives would not be difficult. To achieve two would be much harder. To compete effectively today, many companies find they must pursue all three at the same time, and this is where the real challenges and the big rewards are today.

The majority of the tools and techniques to achieve one or all of these objectives will not be new to you. Most are in use and widely adopted by many companies, all are in use by some companies right now. They appear in many guises and under different acronyms. The key to the successful use of this plethora of techniques, is not to use one of them in isolation but to adopt the most appropriate of each in an integrated way to achieve the company objectives.

The changes any company must make to prepare itself for the challenges of the future are not difficult to learn. The difficult part is to establish a culture where continuous change is not just accepted but becomes a way of life, a culture where the whole company is driving towards a more competitive future through a policy of continuous, irreversible improvement. The aim of this book is not only to describe the tools and techniques but to leave you with the conviction that both you and your company really can achieve that breakthrough to business excellence through excellence in business planning and control.

For many companies the improvements in performance demanded over the last few years have been bewilderingly fast. Where they measured lead times in weeks they now measure in days. Quality which used to be measured as a percentage number of rejects is now measured in defective parts per million. Where delivery on a specific day was regarded as excellent, today delivery to a "window" quoted in hours or even minutes is expected by an increasing number of companies.

For other companies such performance levels may seem unrealistic. They do not believe that their customers need or even want such levels of quality or speed of delivery, nor that it would it be feasible for their particular business. The reality is that the quicker+better+cheaper trend is spreading at a fast and accelerating pace. No-one is surprised to hear of car component suppliers being expected to deliver a mixed sequence of components directly to the assembly line to a schedule quoted only minutes earlier. People may be more surprised to know that most supermarkets are now as demanding as car makers. These two extremes of the industrial spectrum now require very similar high levels of service.

How many companies would have been able to meet quality standards of less than 300 failures per million until recently? The fact is that, to compete against the threat from Canon, Xerox insisted on these levels of service from their suppliers and their suppliers have met the challenge. A hit for Xerox means each delivery must have the right quantity, on the right day, to the right quality and with the correct paperwork.

It is now possible for any company to achieve these excellent standards of customer service. The companies that have already achieved them are not freaks but are faced with the same everyday challenges as other companies. They are highly competitive companies with demanding products.

The impetus for change, more often than not, comes from the customers demand for ever higher standards from suppliers to gain competitive advantages. In such cases companies that do not reach the levels demanded do not survive. In other cases companies have taken the initiative and have made dramatic improvements in the service they are offering their customers. In these cases they are getting an enormous competitive advantage. If their competitors fail to catch up, their demise must be in sight. For a large and increasing number of companies, the Business Excellence concepts discussed in this book are no longer an option, they are a necessity for survival.

To claim to be World Class all you used to have to do was to answer the phone within three rings and say "How can I help you?". The rise of competitive bench marking, where companies compare themselves with the "best in class", has shattered many of these illusions. Many companies have risen to the challenge.

A company that applies the principles described in this book will find itself on a path to reducing lead times, improving delivery reliability and achieve higher levels of quality. They will also find that they achieve this with lower operating costs.

No improvement process can assure a company of survival for ever. Competitors will be forced to catch up or go under. The net result is that after two or three years the surviving competition will have improved. What is proposed in this book is not a one time fix but a strategy that will establish a culture of change resulting in continuous improvement of business performance.

In addition to the short term gains there are long term advantages. Companies that follow these business performance improvement principles will find they work working with a lower and more predictable cost base, thereby raising the barriers to entry for potential new competitors. It is also much more difficult for substitute products to be competitive.

Another group of people who may be reading this book are those from companies who have found themselves on the receiving end of a competitor or a customer who has raised the minimum standards to compete in their markets. The good news for these companies is that they are statistically more likely to be successful with their improvement process. They have a clear understanding of what they need to achieve and there is no better incentive for achievement than survival!