The Premier Conference on Business Analytics and Operations Research.  Vijay will be presenting on April 11 and the title of his presentation is on April 11 at 3:30pm.

Chicago, IL (PRWEB) December 8, 2010

Supply Chain Toolworks (SCTW), a leader in operations strategy planning, is partnering with ScheduleSoft workforce scheduling to enhance their ability to provide customers with the tools necessary to execute their operations and strategy planning. The two companies have formalized an agreement that will allow joint customers, primarily process manufacturers, to leverage the strengths of each company to achieve leaner, more agile manufacturing. The combination of SCTW’s predictive modeling for operational planning and ScheduleSoft’s ability to create an optimized, flexible workforce schedule, means manufacturers can better manage fluctuations in demand, improve product costs and move towards a continuous improvement model.

“We believe the three essential elements to supply chain success are strategic planning, strong analytics and disciplined execution,” said Stephen Johanson, CEO of SCTW. “ScheduleSoft’s unique ability to generate an optimized, flexible schedule makes them an ideal partner to help our clients run lean and absorb fluctuations in production times and quantities.”

“Supply Chain Toolworks has an innovative solution and process that helps manufacturers increase operations cash flow,” said Gregory Flessas, ScheduleSoft CEO. “We also provide our customers with significant costs savings, specifically in the area of labor. Working together, we expect to help manufacturers increase profits and become more agile by helping them change how they plan their operations and execute their workforce scheduling.”

About Supply Chain Toolworks
Supply Chain Toolworks, Inc. provides the next generation of Operations Strategy and Planning solutions to manufacturers. It was founded by core team of operations experts with practical experience helping Chief Operating Officers, Vice President’s, and Directors achieve real, strategic change in their organizations. Supply Chain Toolworks focuses on creating new methods and tools for creating high impact Operations Strategies.

About ScheduleSoft
Founded in 1997, ScheduleSoft is a privately held company based in Madison, Wis. Since its inception, it has focused exclusively on developing workforce scheduling software robust enough to meet the requirements of the most complex work environments, and flexible enough to address changing business needs. With more than 150 customers scheduling for over 50,000 users, leading companies in many industries turn to ScheduleSoft to create an agile workforce that delivers business results.

ABSTRACT:

Trapped capacity occurs when demand variability consumes the effective capacity of a tool or work center. Most people are intuitively aware of it but don’t factor it into planning and line loading. When unmeasured, trapped capacity can lead to extra shifts, breaking run strategies, or shorting of product. This session will investigate the causes behind trapped capacity and detail how to manage it within the context of operations planning.

Attend this session to

* Learn about trapped capacity—what it is, where it comes from, and how it affects the planning environment
* Calculate, quantify, mitigate, and reduce trapped capacity at your business
* Balance variability between safety stock and spare capacity

APICS 2010 is about applying best practices. This session will feature

* Demonstrated statistical models that can be used to manage trapped capacity
* Strategies for building flex capacity into staffing and capital planning
* Solutions and formulas based on original research

Supply Chain Toolworks (SCTW) continues to espouse their cutting edge yet practical angle of Operations Strategy Planning.  Steve Johanson’s article, “Managing Troubled Waters,” was the cornerstone thought piece in APICS’ July/August Issue.  This article provides both a diagnostic and instructive guide for operations executives and managers.  It shows them how they can take two of their critical key performance indicators, Service Level and Inventory Levels, and manage them simultaneously as a unified key performance indicator.

Steve applied SCTW’s extensive experience in cutting costs and improving performance in the food and process industries as case studies in this article.  The premise in this article and the basis of SCTW’s success is that strategic planning, good analytics, and disciplined execution are essentials of Supply Chain Success.

APICS magazine featured this article on the cover of the issue and is sponsoring a Webinar where readers can hear more about this topic and ask the author questions.  You can attend this webinar by following this link: http://www.apics.org/resources/magazine/APICS_extra.htm

About Supply Chain Toolworks:

Supply Chain Toolworks, Inc. provides the next generation of Operations Strategy and Planning solutions to manufacturers. It was founded by core team of operations experts with practical experience helping Chief Operating Officers, Vice President’s, and Directors achieve real, strategic change in their organizations.  Supply Chain Toolworks focuses on creating new methods and tools for creating high impact Operations Strategies.

Our Philosophy:

We believe that human knowledge and intuition is still the best tool to create a strategy — that the “sandbox” approach of leveraging human and computational strengths will always beat the “black box” solution derived by blind computer optimization.

info@sctoolworks.com
(888) 632-7768
www.sctoolworks.com

Lean Manufacturing is and will always be a very human process.  Traditional planning techniques will always over commit capacity and under commit inventory.  They will guarantee that the plan looks lean but the execution is not.

Essentially, they overlook the complexities of their inherent environments—plans are statistically unfeasible. Demand, capacity, operational performance, and inventory are all tightly connected through a set of relationships. Each relationship can be characterized as a linkage made “loose” by lead time and variability factors. Estimates and rules of thumb ignore the impacts, risks, and costs of these factors.

Our Solutions:

• Create an accurate, believable model that will predict the outcome of your run strategy
• Quantify the risks and rewards–find performance and profitability through your run strategy
• Manufacture a replenishment strategy that will achieve service levels, ship life, and satisfy capacity
• Calculate a statistical safety stock that will assure the ability of your team to follow a run strategy
• Create an executable playbook - believable at the executive level, executable at the plant level

Bottom Line:  We give your team the skills to design a rational lean manufacturing strategy and playbook.

OUR SOLUTIONS:

• Quantify the steps and costs to produce and deploy closer to demand
• Provide a Pareto breakdown of barriers to being demand driven
• Quantify the value of improvement projects in order to find the biggest bang or put a real ROI to it
• Show the cost benefit path to being more demand driven.

Bottom line: we take the discussion from where are you going to how are you going to get there… profitably.

Our solutions:

• Create a single, unified, believable model for centralized
• Unify strategic decision making with a single language and currency
• Provide a sandbox for all functional areas to create scenarios and challenge them
• Build consensus across brand, finance, and operations
• Explain results in sophisticated, understandable reporting for all audiences

Bottom Line: Get alignment around the correct and most profitable decisions

Bottom Line: We can help you get closer and closer to your optimum profitability

Bottom Line: We can help you orchestrate your lean solution and drive out the “Plan Harder” culture