Centrally controlled supply of construction sites.
It is a well-known phenomenon that construction sites with more complex installations and supplies are often delayed due to the lack of one or other albeit small part. An average shipyard has no or very limited administrative support and the yard manager usually has something else to do than play the warehouseman and chase after the suppliers.
The case
A series of similar sites must be supplied from a central warehouse with large parts and assembly parts from both our own production and from suppliers. The construction takes several months and the warehouse at the sites (actually only a few containers) has limited storage space. The first reaction in case of shortages is of course: increasing the site warehouse and installing more security, but when there are a larger number of sites this not only becomes an expensive operation, but also requires more and more administration. You can therefore be almost certain that one site is missing exactly those things, which are in surplus at another, and there we go again!
The ‘classical’ way of working was:
In the MRP system, provisional orders are entered which, after explosion, calculate the necessary requirements for manufacture and purchase. However, this way of working requires a lot of data input and, much worse, a lot of corrections to the planned due-dates and numbers. Again, the key problem here is uncertainty. Because not everything is mathematically predictable, the consumption of some parts is different according to local circumstances (they are not standardized IKEA cabinets) and the time planning dares, strange but true, even shift! As a result, shortages and surpluses are legion, not to mention the amount of administrative work one sometimes dares to postpone, resulting in even greater uncertainty.
The new way of working
The company already had an extensive C&DS application for controlling the supply chain and production. The expansion not only makes the MRP run unnecessary for the purchase and launch of manufacturing parts, but also installs a very flexible and transparent follow-up that is very close to reality, no matter how it evolves. The key here too is TOC buffer management. The stock control, which is based on this principle, is self-regulating as it were. In this way, possible shortages are proactively detected and the necessary stock is reduced in order to achieve a very high delivery reliability, while the administrative work, also for purchasing, is greatly simplified.