2008-02-11 : Wood Products Company Implements Decision One
by http://www.taylor.com
One of the largest wood products facilities in Canada recently implemented Decision One as their production scheduling solution. This company's products are available through Home Depot, Rona and selected Home Hardware stores.
Facility Description:
- 180,000 sq. ft.
- State-of-the-art woodworking shop
Equipment List:
- Band saws
- Contour trimming router
- Drill presses
- Drilling/doweling insertion machines
- Edgebanders
- End drills
- Heat tunnel wrapping machine
- In-line beam panel saws
- Notching chop saw
- Point-to-point drills with CNC routing
- Radial arm saws
- Shapers
- Table saws
- Product Mix
This Wood Products Company supply commodity sheet products, high pressure laminates, fabricated forestry products, adhesives, and more to customers in Eastern Canada and the United States.
Scheduling
For many years this Wood Products Company used spreadsheets for production scheduling and found this method time consuming and inflexible to changing customer needs, supply of raw materials and staff availability. In March of 2007 they went looking for a production scheduling solution and came across Taylor Scheduling Software. Shortly thereafter the decision was made to move forward with the purchase and implementation of Decision One to help with the day-to-day scheduling activities of this busy enterprise.
They have now been using Decision One for almost one year and it has simplified their production scheduling process. Orders are entered manually, and then scheduled using Decision One. As things change their production the Scheduler simply drags and drops operations on the interactive Gantt chart, freezes them in place and fills any holes in the schedule with orders that build inventory or rush jobs needed by a customer. Each day the schedule is printed and distributed to the shop floor as a dispatch list and all of the salespeople access daily reports of their orders in Excel from a network drive.
"Decision One has revolutionized our business" explains the president of the company. "In the past production was driven by which salesperson had the ability to convince the shop floor that their orders were more important. Now all production is determined by our Production Scheduler. It has reduced most of the in-house arguments, increased our efficiency 1,000 percent and everything runs a lot smoother because everything is funneled through one person who has the authority to make the final decision."
"We had never run this type of software before. It was totally foreign to us so the learning curve was steep. After too many years of scheduling on the fly it finally dawned upon us that this was really the way to go. The nonsense of everyone having a say as to what order was to get done first has faded away and surprise; everything is getting done! On time I should add!"
He also has a recommendation for prospective Decision One customers: "Make sure you buy a large computer screen so you can view the entire schedule. It really makes a big difference. Also, do not be shy about including the folks at Taylor - they were extremely helpful in getting us up and running."