BACKGROUND

Bay Creek Manufacturing manufactures a wide range of custom clothing and uniforms. They have 3 manufacturing facilities in Mountain View, Summersville, and Salem. Missouri. The main facility in Mountain View has over 25,000 square feet and produces customized and tailored versions of over 300 base product styles. Bay Creek follows a dynamic 15-stage manufacturing process, each involving multiple workstations. During peak season, they have thousands of work orders on the floor at any given time. Each of these work orders is further customized by color, style, and size and is tailored with braid, embroidery, and logos.

CHALLENGE

Bay Creek needed an efficient and automated way to:

• Monitor the real-time locations and statuses of work orders
• Monitor who is working on the orders
• Estimate when orders will be completed
• Automatically alert management to problems
• Track costs at the various manufacturing stages
• Track the history of each order and any associated electronic data

SOLUTION

Bay Creek receives a large number of unique orders. Dynamic load leveling among the workstations must be an ongoing activity that is based on priority and workstation resource availability. This requires real-time visibility. The solution was deployed by adding fixed barcode scanners at each workstation and having several mobile barcode readers to track order movements. Touch-sensitive screens at order pairing locations allow users to quickly pair-up orders with sub-orders. The workstations allow management and supervisors to immediately query the location and status of work orders. When a new work order is received, the system produces a work instruction sheet detailing all the order specifics and the production phases required. This order instruction sheet contains all the barcodes required to accurately track when an action starts and when it completes. An expediter with a mobile reader ensures that the work order passes through the required production stages. At each work station, the employee logs on to the system using the barcode reader and then scans the appropriate start and stop barcodes.

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REAL-TIME BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE FOR ON-DEMAND MANUFACTURING

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