Quick Response Manufacturing: ERP And Value Chain Acceleration
Over the past century, manufacturing strategies have evolved from high volume/low cost to quality improvement. Now, as an additional minimum requirement, manufacturers must address quick response. Whatever the reasons for pursuing a lead-time reduction strategy — customer demands, competitive disadvantages that result in lost market share, high costs or low quality — time compression across all company processes is critical to growth. In some cases, it means survival for today's manufacturers.
The challenges of manufacturing a product have changed and evolved through a series of stages including an emphasis on economies of scale, time-and-motion efficiency, cost reduction, and quality improvement in the form of zero defects. These are all important as minimum requirements for doing business, but the latest dimension, and the one that holds the key to long-term, wide-ranging success encompassing the entire value chain, is speed. It not only offers this promise but does so while achieving all the other objectives combined.