According to David Graffum, IT Director for Stevens Urethane,
"Our company was using a popular spreadsheet program to handle scheduling
when I stepped in as IT Director but there was no way to see the whole
picture. It didn't exist in any one place. There was no accountability
because there was no visibility. That frustration totally changed with
The Planner. It's proving to be a really effective visibility tool."
The Planner allows Graffum, the engineering department, and
other key decision makers in the manufacturing process to see "the whole
picture" in real time, an advantage he considers invaluable in reducing
stock volumes, increasing planning accuracy and proficiency,
eliminating late orders, and overall improving customer satisfaction.
For example, The Planner's unique Drag And Drop feature enables
Stevens' production schedulers to instantaneously see the impact --
sometimes significant -- of even a minor change in planning the
production of their ten manufacturing lines.
According to Graffum, the graphical structure of The Planner
has made his organization proactive in its approach to "problem stopping."
The company is now immediately aware of issues on the plant floor,
something that neither a manual scheduling board nor a spreadsheet
could show them.
Additionally, the program's multi-user viewing system brings
that same "bird's eye view" to the engineering department who further
analyzes the generated scheduling data through Crystal Reports, an
add-on for The Planner.
Stevens Urethane recently integrated The Planner with
Factivity, a
shop floor data collection tool that is live at the factory level.
Graffum indicates that his firm is not yet using the full
power of The Planner, a system that he found exceedingly easy to launch. "Our
plan is to slowly "turn on" the full capacity of The Planner. We're
using only a fraction of the features and we're already light years
ahead in gaining greater control of our manufacturing operations than
we were three months before we went live with The Planner."
The results at Steven Urethane have been so noteworthy in
increasing efficiency and visibility that the company plans to launch The Planner
at Stevens Roofing Systems in Westfield, North Carolina.
Read more about the
The
Planner and its standard specifications.
