Building Models

One of the most destructive lies that most purchasers of Visual Manufacturing are told is that you can operate Visual without using any part numbers. This statement is not technically a lie. You can indeed operate Visual without using a single part number. However, doing so throws away nearly all of the advantages that Visual can bring to your business.

Yet time and again companies who are drowning in the mass of part numbers that their current inflexible system requires, grasp greedily at this thin reed. While dumping part numbers may seem like a great idea, it actually throws away most of the key advantages that come from running any manufacturing system; the ability to keep, find and use history.

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act but a habit."
-- Aristotle

However, the basic problem remains; customized product manufacturers cannot effectively use the highly structured definitions of parts that most manufacturing systems require. If they use a unique part number for each possible configuration of their product, they soon have thousands of part numbers each of which is used just once.

There is no advantage to this approach either. Having thousands of part numbers that are used once prevents the grouping and analysis that is critical to leading your business just as surely as using no part numbers.

Fortunately Visual Manufacturing is flexible enough to allow you to take another approach to this problem. Using loosely defined Engineering Masters, you can use Visual Manufacturing to implement a powerful model-based approach to selling your products.

You now have a single place to store and use data about your products and a convenient way to generate jobs. Because the customization occurs when the job is released each order can still be unique without losing the ability to track and use production history for the product family.

Customizing at the job level is simple when Engineering Masters are constructed according to the model-based products philosphy.

With models a single part number can describe tens or even hundreds of possible configurations. Now job release, design changes and data analysis is simple, efficient and smart.

Models are not a halfway house between using discrete part numbers and no part numbers. Instead, they are a powerhouse that you can use to build consistency and speed into your order intake process and reliability in your products.

I am Kurt B. Carr and I have years of experience in teaching companies how to use Visual Enterprise as a tool to operate effectively and achieve success. Call (941.776.3830) or email me today to learn how to model change in your business using the tools in Visual Manufacturing and help from me.

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