Ruskin Company (Ruskin), a leading manufacturer of heating and air conditioning system components, and a long-time MAC-PAC XE user, has recently deployed MAC-PAC XE Priority Manager to help streamline manufacturing and improve customer responsiveness at their Rochester, Indiana manufacturing plant. Priority Manager has been implemented as a key tool in helping that plant transition to a lean, flow-based approach to manufacturing.

The Rochester facility manufactures air moving components and assemblies marketed under the Lau Industries brand name. Primary products are furnace blower assemblies often referred to as 'squirrel cage' blowers. Customers include major HVAC system manufacturers like Trane, Lenox, Carrier, and Goodman, as well as Grainger, and others. Some customers purchase a relatively steady supply of products with JIT delivery to their own production lines, while others, such as Grainger, order more sporadically and require rapid delivery of made-to-order products. Traditionally, the plant has enabled short delivery lead times by producing intermediate items such as fan wheels and housing sides in advance of actual end-item demand.

Driven Toward Lean

One of the forces driving the plant toward a lean production flow is space. Rochester will soon be producing an increased number of products, which means a much wider range of intermediate components such as blower wheels must be manufactured. The facility simply does not have the space to store all of the potential intermediate assemblies in significant quantities. So to maintain a short delivery lead time without the luxury of stocking intermediate items, plant management had to develop a way to rapidly produce any given combination of products, from low level components through finished assemblies, within a few days time.

Only with that approach could they eliminate the need to stock space-consuming intermediate items while still meeting customer delivery requirements. And, with the help of scheduling experts from TDCI partner, Systems Plus, that is what Priority Manager has helped them do.

Priority Manager is a Key Lean Enabler

The process is straight-forward, but highly effective. Priority Manager is used each day to translate a 3-7 day horizon of end item shipment requirements into synchronized production schedules (quantity and sequence) for each of approximately 14 work centers so that each work center makes exactly what will be needed by downstream operations the same or following day. In this way, no more than one day's worth of WIP needs to be stored in front of each work center, even though a wide range of products is being rapidly produced over the course of any given week or month.

Enabled by Priority Manager, this approach essentially pulls production through all of the work centers based upon the plant's actual near-term demand.

"Moving to a lean, demand-driven manufacturing model is imperative for us in order to support our growth plans," states Rochester Plant Manager, Scott Marquardt. "Priority Manager is playing an important part in our overall strategy to make that happen."

No Changes to MAC-PAC XE

Priority Manager has been implemented using Ruskin's existing MAC-PAC XE BOM and routing data with no change other than clean-up of certain data fields such as planner IDs and commodity codes. In fact, the daily Priority Manager-generated schedules given to each cell manager make data discrepancies so obvious that it became a 'self-cleansing' process in the early days of system use.

Although it took some analysis to determine the best way to address Ruskin's needs, the implementation of Priority Manager went smoothly, and Ruskin is quite happy with the results. The solution fits the spirit of lean in that it is easy to understand, repeatable, and self-adjusting to the realities of the shop floor.

MAC-PAC XE Priority Manager integrates the award-winning OTTO ('On-Time Orders') software product developed by Systems Plus Inc. with core MAC-PAC XE manufacturing applications to clearly identify the near-term actions operations managers need to take in order to ship orders on time, reduce expediting activity, and minimize inventory levels. In addition to Ruskin, Priority Manager is now being used by MAC-PAC XE companies such as Camfil Farr, Cincinnati Incorporated, Cooper B-Line, Gilbarco Veeder-Root, Link-Belt, and ImagePoint.

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