Reducing lead times ensures satisfied customers, is good for business, and provides an enterprise-wide management strategy to improve the competitiveness of your company. Learn how a unified focus on reducing lead times can eliminate waste, reduce costs and improve quality in all areas of your enterprise.

Time is the most important resource in today’s increasingly competitive global markets. Short product lead times will make customers stick with a company and ensure growing market share. Long lead times often result in large inventories, high WIP, unhappy customers and, ultimately, falling competitiveness.

In this workshop, you will find out about the many hidden costs of long lead times and see how Quick Response Manufacturing tools and methods can be used to eliminate these costs in all functional areas of your enterprise.

After finishing this course, you will be able to:

• Assess the lead time situation in your company
• Identify improvement opportunities
• Use your understanding of QRM principles to convince others of the need for change
• Start implementing an initial QRM project

The Power of Time

• The many hidden costs of long lead times and the power of short lead times
• Pitfalls of traditional methods and how QRM provides a new approach to lead time reduction
• Evaluating your organization(s) through short QRM quiz
• Group workshop on waste due to long lead times

QRM and Organization Structure

• The Response Time Spiral and ways to eliminate
• QRM’s cellular structure and how it works
• Case studies on cell implementation

Understand and Exploit System Dynamics

• Rethinking traditional efficiency and utilization measures
• Strategies for developing effective lot sizes
• Capacity planning: key relationships between utilization and lead time
• Accounting strategies

QRM – an Enterprise-wide, Unified Strategy

• How QRM extends beyond the shop floor
• QRM solutions for material planning, shop floor control (POLCA), supply chain management, office operations
• Mindeset and performance measures

Charlene Yauch

Charlene A. Yauch, Ph.D., P.E., has been an engineering educator for over 20 years at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Milwaukee School of Engineering (MSOE) and Oklahoma State University. Her notable honors include five teaching awards and a National Science Foundation Career grant. She has taught a wide variety of classes, including Manufacturing Systems Design & Analysis, Materials & Manufacturing Processes, Computer Numerical Control Machining, Automation Technologies, and Engineering Economy.

Her professional interests relate to the implementation of manufacturing system improvements, such as Quick Response, Lean, and Agile Manufacturing, with emphasis on the human, social, and organizational aspects. Prior to her doctoral degree, she worked in industry for six years, performing a wide variety of tasks for manufacturing firms, including simulation modeling, facility layout, and process improvement. She has also advised numerous student projects related to manufacturing system improvement.  Dr. Yauch has a multi-disciplinary educational background with a bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering from Purdue University, and graduate degrees in sociology (M.S.), manufacturing systems engineering (M.S.), and industrial engineering (Ph.D.) from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.