Quick Response Manufacturing (QRM) Consulting Services
Achieving Business Excellence for the High-Mix Low-Volume (HMLV) and Custom-Engineered Products Manufacturer
Are you tired of losing customers due to slow turnaround times, high costs, and poor quality? Quick Response Manufacturing (QRM) can change that for you, without breaking the bank. Adopting QRM can revolutionize the way job shop manufacturers do business, allowing for faster market entry and increased competitiveness in a dynamic environment. It can fuel top and bottom-line grow by reducing costs, enhancing delivery performance, improving quality and increasing market share.
QRM is a companywide strategy that cuts lead times in all phases of manufacturing and office operations. It’s about doing critical things that your competitors aren’t doing and building core capabilities within your enterprise that competitors can’t easily replicate. For example, when your customer orders custom engineered products, if you can consistently turn them around in five weeks whereas your biggest competitor can barely hit twenty-five weeks, imagine how much that could grow sales and market share. Additionally, if you slash product costs 30% by eliminating waste through shortening lead times, the labor-cost advantage of low-wage countries evaporates. You can then compete against anyone, anytime, anywhere!
But How Does it Work?
QRM incorporates four core concepts that have been time-tested over the years to reduce overall lead time and build a solid foundation for sustained growth:
- Power of Time: Squeezing out time throughout your enterprise not only boosts your agility but also leads to improvements in cost, quality and delivery performance. Manufacturing Critical-path Time (MCT) is the time-based Key Performance Indicator (KPI) that quantifies your organization’s total system-wide waste and reveals improvement opportunities to guide your organization on its path to industry leadership (see sidebar for sample MCT Map).
- Rethinking Organizational Structure: To shrink total lead time by 80-90%, a paradigm shift from functional departments to “QRM Cells” is necessary, both on the shop floor and in the office. Unlike the Toyota Production System Cells used in higher volume environments, QRM Cells are more flexible and do not require sequential flow, making them ideal for handling unpredictable customer demand and custom-engineered products common in job shops. In contrast to the traditional command and control management structure, QRM Cells are staffed with self-directed teams who take ownership of the entire delivery process within their cell. The team members are cross-trained, creating a flexible workforce that can float to wherever the bottlenecks are. To support this new structure, businesses need to convert from a cost-based mindset, which focuses on maximizing efficiency and utilization, to a time-based mindset that prioritizes reducing MCT. By embracing this concept, businesses can achieve radical and sustained performance improvement (see sidebar for sample QRM Cell).
- Understanding and Exploiting System Dynamics: QRM uses insights from system dynamics, which examine the interactions between jobs, people, and machines, to make intelligent decisions involving capacity planning, resource utilization, and production lot-sizing that can compress MCT and reduce total costs. Instead of keeping machines and employees constantly busy, which can lead to congestion and exponentially increase lead times as utilization approaches 100%, QRM leverages “The Miraculous Effect of Spare Capacity” to eliminate congestion and dramatically improve flow. The sidebar graph demonstrates that at high utilization levels, where there is minimal spare capacity, a relatively small investment in additional spare capacity (indicated by the horizontal arrow) can result in a considerable reduction in lead time (as illustrated by the vertical arrow). It is essential to design a system that can accommodate variability, and the higher the variability, the more reserve capacity is needed. System dynamics provides formulas to quantify spare capacity and lot-sizes, which are typically less than traditional Economic Order Quantity (EOQ) calculations, so you can make the best-informed decisions.
- Implementing a Unified Strategy Enterprise-wide: To fully realize the benefits of QRM, it’s important that all areas of the company engage in time-based thinking. The QRM strategy extends beyond the shop floor to Office Operations (e.g., Quick Response Office Cells [Q-ROC]), Material Planning (e.g., High-Level MRP [HL/MRP]), Visual Shop Floor Control System (e.g., POLCA), Supply Management (e.g., Time-Based Supply Management), Accounting (e.g., Time-Based Cost Justification), and New Product Introduction (Rapid New-Product Introduction). Taking a holistic approach helps ensure that you’re optimizing overall business performance rather than just sub-optimizing local departments or individual activities within various functions (see sidebar illustration).
QRM’s strategic focus on time-based competition (TBC) is well-suited for the high-mix low-volume (HMLV) and custom-engineered products manufacturer. Many of these companies who have already invested in other performance excellence programs such as lean or six sigma, build on these efforts and unite them under the QRM umbrella with the single overarching goal of reducing lead time.
The Major Benefits
The benefits of Quick Response Manufacturing are numerous and can have a significant impact on a company’s success. Companies that adopt QRM often report the following benefits:
- Gain a competitive advantage: Delivering short lead times throughout the enterprise, from office operations through production to shipping, can differentiate your business from the competition providing a strategic weapon in your arsenal.
- Capture market share: Fulfilling orders faster with higher quality and lower prices than competitors and introducing new products to the market before others can help you grow your company’s sales and market share.
- Improve cash flow: Speedy turnaround requires eliminating excess inventories, getting money in your pocket sooner. Additionally, reducing lead time can help your company to be more responsive to customer demand, increasing sales and improving cash-to-cash cycle time.
- Increase profitability: Focusing on speed helps to reduce costs associated with overtime, inventory holding, materials handling, rework/scrap, expediting hot jobs, lost sales, order cancellations and much more. By reducing these wastes, you can lower your overhead, increase productivity, improve quality, and generate higher revenue, ultimately leading to greater profitability and making your business more competitive in the market.
- Greater flexibility and agility: QRM allows your business to become more adaptable to changes in the industry. By reducing lead times, improving delivery times, increasing visibility, and enhancing collaboration, QRM makes it easier for you to quickly adjust to changes in demand, market conditions, and customer needs. This leads to greater flexibility and agility, allowing your business to stay ahead of the competition and meet the evolving needs of your customers.
- Better employee satisfaction and engagement: By improving work processes, reducing stress and chaos, increasing autonomy, enhancing collaboration, implementing cross-training, empowering teams, improving customer satisfaction, and providing more challenging work, QRM can lead to better employee satisfaction and engagement. This means happier, more productive employees who are invested in the success of your business.
Quick Response Manufacturing (QRM) is a proven strategy that can transform your business, providing a competitive edge and securing its future. Companies that have implemented QRM have reported significant benefits, such as reducing lead times by 50 to 90%, lowering costs by 10 to 40%, achieving on-time delivery rates of over 99%, and gaining a substantial increase in market share. By adopting QRM, your business can operate with greater agility and efficiency, enabling you to meet the changes in customer preferences and demands while maintaining a productive and profitable operation.
How PES Can Help
At PES, we offer Quick Response Manufacturing consulting services that can help transform your enterprise to slash lead times, achieve greater profitability, and improve performance. Our certified QRM consultant will partner with you and your team to analyze your current manufacturing and office operations, identify areas for improvement, develop a customized plan to address these issues and help implement the solutions.
Our QRM consulting services include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Formulation of a time-based operations strategy that will give you a competitive advantage in the market and greater profitability.
- Mapping the Manufacturing Critical-path Time (MCT) current and future states to identify and visualize the critical path, focus improvement efforts on the areas that will have the greatest impact on lead time, quantify the impact of the improvement projects and track progress.
- Identifying Focused Target Market Segments (FTMSs) to separate and streamline flows.
- Designing flexible shop floor layouts and QRM cells for the high-mix, low-volume manufacturers that promote continuous flow.
- Restructuring the organization for QRM success, including transforming from functional departments to QRM cells, from top-down control to team ownership, from specialized narrowly focused workers to a cross-trained workforce, and from cost-based to time-based thinking.
- Facilitating Quick Changeover / Single Minute Exchange of Die (SMED) workshops to significantly reduce batch sizes, uneven flow, production loss and output variability.
- Planning and implementing a hybrid Push-Pull Shop Floor Control System using High Level MRP (HL/MRP) and Paired-cell Overlapping Loops of Cards with Authorization (POLCA) visual control system that manages the flow of jobs through the shop floor.
- Breaking down departmental silos such as quoting, design, and order processing by forming Quick Response Office Cells (Q-ROC) to improve order capture rate, streamline order processing to reduce hand-offs, and release orders to the shop floor quicker.
- Transforming purchasing using Time-Based Supply Management.
- Switching to time-based cost justification of QRM projects and enhancing the accounting system to shift from cost-based to time-based decisions.
- Developing a QRM implementation plan tailored to your specific needs.
- Providing training and support for employees to ensure successful adoption of QRM principles and practices.
With our QRM consulting services, you can expect to see a sustainable reduction in lead times, increased productivity and improved overall performance.
About PES
Productivity Engineering Services LLC (PES) is an independent Industrial Engineering and Operations Management consulting firm helping clients achieve their business goals since 1992. We specialize in planning, designing, and implementing lean manufacturing, warehousing, and supply chain operations that optimize performance and drive results.
Being amongst an exclusive group of QRM consulting service providers, our commitment lies in delivering the highest level of expertise and guidance to our clients. To stay at the forefront of QRM knowledge and implementation, we have acquired specialized QRM education directly from the inventor, Rajan Suri. Through this pursuit of exceptionalism, we have earned a professional certification in QRM, demonstrating mastery of its’ knowledge and the ability to lead organizations through QRM implementations, improve operational and financial performance, and educate others about QRM principles.
At PES, we take a collaborative approach to working with our clients, listening closely to their unique challenges and opportunities, and developing customized solutions that meet their specific needs. Our proven track record of delivering outstanding results and building long-term partnerships with our clients reflects our commitment to excellence in industrial engineering and operations management consulting.
Take the Next Step!
Don’t let long lead times hold your business back. Contact us today (734) 425-3904 to learn how our QRM consulting services can help your company achieve its goals. Don’t worry, you won’t get stuck in an automated phone tree or have to endure a pushy sales rep. This is the direct line to Chief Solutions Officer Jeffrey Miller.
Email: jmiller@PESsolutions.com