Case Study #1:
JSI Plant-80/Jasper Desk, as Lead Project Manager was tasked with forming of a winning manufacturing team to turn-around the plant and support an extremely aggressive growth within less than a year. By implementing and utilizing InAccord, an innovative manufacturing and scheduling software, live synced to a host M2M ERP (Aptean Corp), we’ve drastically improved the value stream and increase production by 300% in less than 7 months! This manufacturer was able to turn the bottom line from a loss of 5%, to a positive profit of 6%, in less than 12 months. Labor percentage decreased from 37% to 21% and WIP reduced by 60%. This company has also been able to maintain the increased output and profitability for three years to date while driving labor cost further lower.
Case Study #2:
Kimball, Salem Metal Plant, as Lead Project Manager for installing InAccord in the Kimball Salem Metal Plant. By utilizing the Production and Planning tool, and building concrete Manager ownership, we were able to increase the daily output in excess of 30% after just one month of the implementation. This equated to $350K per week increased capacity with the same amount of resources, and with a substantially decreased labor cost.
Case Study #3:
Kimball, Jasper Campus Metal Plant, as Lead Project Manager for InAccord in the Kimball Metal Plant, Jasper campus. By utilizing this planning tool as synced to SAP, and deploying to the shop floor, we have realized a 38% increase in production in less than (2) months and in some Resources/product-lines improvement in excess of 45%.
Case Study #4:
Kimball Tops and Panel Plant, as Lead Project Manager for installing InAccord in the Kimball Tops and Panel Plant. By utilizing this planning tool and deploying to the shop floor along with a tighter value stream, we have realized a 20% increase in daily output. The first month after utilizing the scheduling module, there was a 34% decrease in actual versus standard labor. This equates to on average 26K per month in Labor Savings (See below). This also increased the selling capacity by $5.2 million with the same lead time and resource-allocation.
InAccord for the Future: Integration in a SAP Environment
- InAccord over the past four years has evolved into an all inclusive ERP system. InAccord has been converted entirely to become a Web & Smart-device Based application, and becoming, evermore, an extremely user friendly tool for the future.
- The program is running as a stand alone ERP, as well as a perfect sync bolt on to SAP and other mainstream ERP systems. The results are staggering as production and communication has been improved in such a short period of time, as seen in the testimonials above.
- The majority of the implementation period was spent vetting information pulled from SAP into InAccord. The actual training of the scheduling and shop floor personnel was quick and less than two weeks at each facility.
- Kimball was excited with the results and the ability of InAccord to dramatically enhance it’s SAP environment, they also requested the development of a Web Service in conjunction with their team to send Production dates back to SAP. InAccord is now, 2-way-sync’d and their total Scheduling and shop floor tool.
- Lastly, we have integrated material requirements as needed by SAP so that the company can leverage InAccord’s integrated supply-chain/capacity ATP algorithm and dashboards across the board thus allowing best response to their Customers at any time in real-time.
InAccord for the Future: A Client’s & User’s Perspective
- In my 28 years in the Manufacturing and Supply Chain arena, I was always trying to devise a way to schedule a Shop Floor in a more efficient and flowing value stream. I have not come across anything before InAccord that could handle the daunting task so effortlessly and quickly. Managing different Resources, UOM’s, and the Regulators being able to schedule and synchronize a mix based process, with multiple BOM levels, per algorithm parameters, the increase in productivity is realized in a short period of time. It is also easily adjusted up or down manually based on the customer needs, or enable the use of its intuitive aspect that can automatically adjust to InAccord learned-capacity when turned on.
- In closing, I would like to say that no place I have personally put InAccord in as the production system has failed. It has provided the most exciting transformation of business cost, throughput, and customer satisfaction that I have ever seen during my career. InAccord is amazing either as a bolt on, or as a more integrated Operations/Production module that SAP could utilize for many years to come.
Greg Sykes, IA Systems Implementation Mgr. at Kimball Office