CHALLENGE

Design of optimal and feasible integral supply chain for various companies in High-tech, Consumer Goods, Food and Building Materials

APPROACH

  • Determine goal, scope, decision criteria and decision-making process.
  • Involve all stakeholders and experts during the process to get commitment and create trust.
  • Make sure all relevant data on actual situation and future trends are available.
  • Tailor and validate a mathematical optimisation model of the global supply chain.
  • Organise decision preparation workshops in which scenarios are developed and discussed.
  • Organise session to discuss recommended options as basis for a decision on the design of choice.

CHALLENGE

Maintenance contractor for Rail Infrastructure executes maintenance based on human inspection of rail track videos.

Introduce predictive maintenance technology to streamline and improve inspection.

APPROACH

  • Gather data on inspections executed to create a large test set of observations.
  • Develop a deep learning algorithm (based on neural networks) to automate the inspection.
  • Minimise false positives (judged okay but in fact not okay) and false negatives (judged not okay but in fact okay).
  • Test and validate the software in the live environment.
  • Transfer the software to the maintenance organisation.

CHALLENGE

Manufacturer of complex components

  • Strong market position and the ambition to grow significantly.
  • However, their New Product Development and Introduction (NPI) lead times were way to slow to enable the growth.

Take a leap step in NPI-cycle time reduction.

Lean Six Sigma (the company is highly skilled in this) didn’t enable them to tackle the problem.

APPROACH

  • Engineering, Operations and Supply Chain formed an integrated team for the assignment.
  • The plan was to visualise the customer journey for a sample request from the customer’s point of view. This was a challenge as the data was scattered across multiple sources. Once the case identifier to track individual cases was identified, the full customer journey could be visualised through process mining.
  • The bottlenecks were identified and a new NPI-process was designed and introduced without adversely affecting the on-time production performance of the normal production.

CHALLENGE

Leading manufacturer of customised precision parts

  • Complex production process comprising multiple process steps across various pieces of equipment.
  • Product quality is made by the first process step, but can only be determined at the last.
  • This feedback cycle (i.e., the production cycle) needs to be quicker to prevent production losses.

Reduce the production time by 50% from 4 to 2 weeks.

The company is highly skilled in Six Sigma, which had already helped them to reduce the cycle time from 11 to 4 weeks. However, the traditional Six Sigma suite of tools could not help them any further.

APPROACH

  • The first action was to analyse the production with process mining: Huge variations in takt times between workstations were uncovered.
  • Workstations were recombined to rebalance the takt times: A consequence was that the heartbeat of the subcontractor’s process had to be synchronised.
  • Further, the available time for preventive maintenance increased.

CHALLENGE

Structurally loss-making production facility of a global can manufacturer was to be returned to profit.

APPROACH

  • One-week Quick Scan to identify potential and key levers.
  • Eight-month Implementation to upgrade the performance management system (ensure closed PDCA-loop, improve availability and quality of data, install visual management throughout the factory), address the production planning and scheduling, improve the asset availability, reduce cost of poor quality, reduce working capital and take out 25% of the payroll costs.