What does it take to schedule production for 11,000 items?
Ever wonder how we manage to keep about 11,000 products in stock virtually all the time?
Well, it all starts with having the right people in the right jobs. In this case, it’s Brenda Girard who is our Manufacturing Coordinator here at The Worth Company. Brenda constantly monitors and schedules the production of all our products as well as all the components and raw materials used to make them. Quite a task you might think... and you'd be right. Here's how she does it...
All our production items as well as raw materials have a "reorder point" quantity entered into our computer system. When the inventory of that item gets below our reorder point, the system notifies Brenda that it needs attention. Brenda then reviews how fast we've been selling or consuming that item, then enters an order to make a new production run. The system then checks to see if we have all the raw materials necessary to make those items, and if needed notifies the purchasing department that we may need to order more raw materials. They would then review those requirements a well, and perhaps issue a purchase order for additional steel or brass. But that's only the start.
The next operation is the assigning of factory production orders. When we need to produce something, Brenda looks at all the machines capable of producing that part, and how busy they are. She then assigns a machine to produce the part, and a priority based on an immediate need, an anticipated need, or for future stock. All this information is then compiled into work orders for each department so they know what to produce next, on which piece of machinery to produce it, and in which order to produce all the jobs they must run. This can be quite a balancing act during busy times.
It is our goal to ship all orders within 24 hours with no backorders. We don't always quite achieve this, but we do about 85% of the time. That's pretty impressive when you consider that we produce all Worth items here in our own factory. But we also like the control, and the knowledge that we can 'go the extra mile' to provide you, our customer, with the best delivery, quality and pricing in the industry.
Brenda does an incredible job managing all this information, and we are so happy to have her working behind the scenes to help keep everybody up and running on time. Thanks Brenda!