Integrating Lean with Enterprise Systems
Quantitative, Dynamic, Synchronized
Lean relies on accurate, reliable, and timely data. Whether you are calculating the takt time or reviewing cycle times, changeovers, yield, or downtime, having a solid base of information is foundational. At the heart of your lean initiative are the metrics that you'll use to drive improved performance. You don't really understand a process until you understand it quantitatively.
The same can be said of your ERP system, it too relies on accurate, reliable, and timely data. And you'll find that both your lean team and your ERP system rely on the much of the same kind of information - product structures, routings, engineering data, sales or demand forecasts, and customer orders.
Yet in many organizations, there's a complete "wall" between the lean team and the rest of the enterprise, especially those areas which rely on an ERP system such as materials management, planning, procurement, or supply chain. VSEM helps to build bridges between your lean team and the rest of the enterprise by using the data from your ERP fully and integrating your lean value stream planning and scheduling with your existing planning functions.
Relating ERP data to lean value streams.
Data Needed for Lean
All of your data is really enterprise data whether maintained in your ERP's database, manually collected and managed, or in spreadsheets on servers. Lean needs item and bill of material information, routing information, process capabilities (by item if possible), sales forecast and demand, orders and inventory. This data can be quickly and easily imported from ERP systems using standard formats or updated from spreadsheets. Lean initiatives draw data from many functions in the enterprise and merge it to provide a view of operations from a lean perspective. Organizations with solid, reliable data find that they can move ahead very, very quickly in their lean initiative when reliable data is available to the lean team using VSEM. more
Organizing Data by Value StreamLean intiatives introduce the fundamental concept of a value stream to an organization. Your lean initiative begins with the identification of the products in a value stream based on similar processes. Once defined, value stream maps and all of the underlying data is collected - again by value stream. VSEM allows you to quickly and easily distribute your ERP data from one or more ERP systems into your lean value streams. more
ERP Planning and Lean
One of the biggest challenges that organizations face is how to plan lean value streams. Traditional understanding of S&OP, MPS, and MRP need to be augmented with lean concepts of pull, flow, scheduling at one point and visual factory management. While many lean practitioners would prefer to simply ignore ERP planning, this is short-sighted, unnecessary, and unrealistic. Rather, MRP's planning can be coordinated with your VSEM value stream model to smoothly allow MRP to function as it should and lean to function as it should - both complementing the overall business goals of lead time reduction, waste elimination and increased profitability. more
The Role of ERP with Lean
What's the proper role of your ERP with lean? There's not a single answer. However, the ERP should be used as fully as possible to provide as much of the data to your lean initiative as possible. Where data is lacking, VSEM can be used to augment your enterprise data. From a transaction execution perspective, the ERP serves a necessary function to manage inventory fully, and to make financial postings to the general ledger. More
Automating ERP Integration
Businesses in general find themselves challenged with the increasing pace of change. New product introductions, demand changes, continuous process improvements occur frequently. In addition to your lean team driving change, the lean initiative must also respond to changes from the rest of the business. Dynamically including changes into your value streams is enabled by complete integration of VSEM with your ERP system. A complete set of tools is available for IT to completely automate every VSEM function requiring data from your ERP. Together, VSEM and ERP complement one another as key enablers of your lean transformation and ongoing business improvement. more