5 Upstream Causes Behind Late Shipments In Manufacturing (Continued)

Remember the Wadeville manufacturer’s story tracing the missed deadline?

Here is the follow up of that story… 

PART 2: The fix - Three months later

Same customer near Paarl, another 40 racks, same Friday 10am deadline. Same Thandi, but this time she has Floware.co.za running the shop.

Monday, purchasing.

Same price increase email comes from the steel supplier, but this time it doesn't sit in an inbox waiting for Thandi. The Floware system works by dividing tasks into digital job cards and it guides you to put business rules in place as to how the job is to be completed. 

Thandi's rule is simple: if steel price variance is under 10% and the job is confirmed, auto-approve. The job card for Paarl is already linked to the supplier email through its integrations with email and billing.

Joseph clicks approve on his phone, Floware automatically creates the PO, sends it, and the stock is confirmed for Tuesday. The system also set up a proactive alert where potential problems and bottlenecks can be handled before turning into a problem, so if the supplier doesn't confirm in four hours, Thandi gets an alert — no two-day delay.

Tuesday, inventory.

At 11am steel arrives. Cutting starts. At the same time Thandi checks her dashboard. Because Floware integrates important business processes such as shipping, financial management, production, finance and customer service in one place, and because it has real-time dashboards, she can see actual inventory, not the wall sheet. Bin B4 shows 40 bolt sets, not 200. The system flagged it on Friday when that gate job booked them out. It already auto-created a purchase task for Bolt & Nut. Bolts arrive Tuesday at 10am before they are needed; no emergency drive to Jet Park necessary.

Wednesday, the welding bottleneck. 

Thandi opens project management. Floware provides a full stack to create an unlimited number of tasks, break big jobs into subtasks, allocate hours and set task dependencies. On her screen the Paarl racks are not one job, they are 40 subtasks with dependencies, and Samuel's coded weld is marked as the critical path. The staircase is scheduled after, not during. Samuel sees only his queue on his phone. No shouting across the shop. Both jobs flow.

Wednesday, powder coating

Thandi doesn't drop frames and hope; because the external coater is a vendor in Floware. All communication is logged in a timeline of interactions, and the job card for coating has a due time. When the coater marks it as received, Thandi sees it. When they mark it as queued, she sees it too. At 2pm Floware shows it is still queued, so it automatically sends the client an SMS update and sends Thandi an alert. 

She calls and negotiates a split, gets 20 frames back Wednesday night. The automated creation and distribution of reports means that Thandi knows exactly where her order is without phoning to find out.

Thursday, quality and dispatch.

6am; final assembly. The jig was checked on Wednesday because Floware created a quality job card after the last slip. 

All 40 racks square. 

At 8:00 Thandi clicks. The quote converts to invoice with one click and at the same time delivery note, waybill and dispatch checklist are auto-created from the job cards. The truck was booked automatically when the job hit 90%. Elmarie already printed the paperwork from home, because it is secure, cloud-based software storage. 

The truck leaves Wadeville at 08:30 on Thursday. It arrives just before 10:00 in Paarl on Friday. The installer team is waiting. Everything on time as planned.

Thandi later looks at the timeline. The truck was never the problem. It was just the last thing everyone saw.

Conclusion

Oftentimes late trucks are symptoms of (fixable) late decisions. 

Ready to see what your Friday 10am looks like with Floware? Book a demo today.