Flow Manufacturing Solution

The fast pace and global nature of the hi-tech and manufacturing industry demands continual innovation, speed, and agility even while finding ways to reduce cost and wastage of any kind. Flow manufacturing, or to be precise, a 'Single piece flow' is the ideal state where parts are manufactured one at a time, and flows throughout the manufacturing and supply chain as a single unit, transferred as per a customer's order. It is the linking of manual and machine operations into the most efficient combination of resources, to maximize value-added content while minimizing waste. Therefore it supports just-in-time, lean manufacturing, and other similar philosophies and systems.

Current challenges in traditional manufacturing include the infamous 7 wastes - labor, overproduction, space, defects, unnecessary human motions, inventory, and transportation. Therefore there is a critical need for a solution that can address the following key areas:

• Manufacturing large batches of parts simultaneously
• Minimizing part movement and inventory
• Reducing lead times, cycle times, and waiting times
• Increasing productivity and quality performance
• Increasing flexibility

HCL's Flow Manufacturing solution is unique because it is more like a unique manufacturing strategy designed to eliminate wastage (manual/machine/process, etc). It is designed to overcome several business challenges that include:

• Assembly Scheduling
• Build to Sequence / Ship to Sequence
• Build to Bulk / Ship to Sequence
• Sales Order Demand
  • Ability to Flow Schedule for a specific customer ship to location
  • Ability to Flow Schedule for a group of customers' ship to locations
  • Create Flow Schedule for all the ship to locations for a specific customer
• Planned Order Demand
  • Ability to Flow Schedule for a specific planner
  • Ability to Flow Schedule for a group of planners
  • Ability to Flow Schedule for all planners
• Sales Order Linkage to Assembly Schedule

• Sequencing of orders based on user-defined criteria
• Creation of flow schedules to fulfill either unscheduled SALES ORDERS or unscheduled PLANNED ORDERS
• Setup of scheduling rules with the sequencing criteria that best meets particular business needs
• Easy generation of shop floor reports:
  • Flow Assembly Scheduling Report (Parameter settings allow to pick select components)
  • Component Shortage Report
  • BOM Report
  • Pick List Report
  • Payout and Shipping Labels

Utilizing HCL's flow manufacturing solution, customers can derive many long-term gains. These include:

• Improved quality and fewer defects - as the batch size is essentially one, there will not be mountains of inventory to count, move, store and eventually pick. Furthermore, single piece flow ensures that if there is a quality problem with a particular part, you are sure that the defect has affected just one part. You do not need to dedicate hours isolating and testing parts in the production run to determine if they meet quality standards
• Reduced Inventory - implementing single piece flow will require each operation to only produce what is needed by the next operation. When followed properly, the process will eliminate any opportunity to build ahead. Consequently, inventories will not be allowed to build up
• Requires less space - as inventory levels are reduced, less space and manpower will be required to manage (receive, count, stock, store, pick and deliver) them. In addition, single piece flow usually requires creating manufacturing cells that squeeze machines as close together as possible so that a single operator can oversee many machines with the least amount of walking motion
• Enhances overall manufacturing flexibility - the less inventory in a value steam, the shorter the lead-time will be from customer order to product delivery. In a single piece flow environment, since you operate with fewer inventories, lead-times will also drop which will give you more time to react to customer orders