KOYO & Datacraft Solutions e-Kanban Make Huge Impact
Koyo is a very lean organization; they were solely internally
relying on visual signals to trigger supplier replenishment of
consumed inventory. Koyo originally signed up with Datacraft
Solutions to help manage the flow of some 3000 faxes per day
that were being sent to 30 of key suppliers on kanban.
Management of this volume of cards was unwieldy and error prone.
Although the visual system was maintaining the flow of
inventory, it was only at great administrative expense. Koyo's
first phase was to bring in Signum, the e-kanban product of
Datacraft Solutions, and migrate the manual faxbans onto an
electronic kanban platform that included bar code scanning of
inventory consumption and automatically conveying that kanban
signal to suppliers. The immediate benefit of this transition
was to relieve buyer planners of a significant workload while
keeping the internal process improvements transparent to their
suppliers so as not to require their involvement.
After several months in production, a new Materials Manager,
Mark Mekanik, who had come from a more traditional manufacturing
environment, was hired to oversee the raw material and purchased
parts warehouse. Very early on he learned that it was impossible
to get answers to the seemingly simple questions of:
* How much inventory of part number X do I have on hand? * How
much is on order? * When will it arrive?
These were questions that were easily answered in his ERP
experience but seemed quite elusive in this flow oriented kanban
replenishment environment.
Mark immediately initiated a project that would integrate
Signum, his electronic kanban system, with his ERP system,
Syteline. The goal of this project was to develop a "perpetual
inventory system" that would provide answers to the questions he
was seeking, while not disrupting the value he was getting from
his electronic kanban platform. Koyo went live with their
integrated systems in early 2005.
Datacraft Solutions www.datacraftsolutions.com Matthew Marotta
800-819-5326
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