Onsite Seminar—Manufacturing Strategy

Introduce your executive team to Manufacturing Strategy concepts & issues with this one-day seminar.  It will help them align and coordinate their policies and functional strategies so that the business unit, Marketing, Finance and Manufacturing unify and mutually reinforce each other.

Manufacturing Strategy, while compatible with Lean and Six Sigma, goes beyond these mostly prescriptive approaches. It starts from the fundamentals of markets and other environmental factors and integrates manufacturing considerations that are often ignored.

This program is based on the work of Wickham Skinner, Hayes & Wheelwright, Roger Schmenner, Terry Hill and many others. In addition, it draws upon our own experience of many consulting projects that provides examples and background.

Participants Will Learn...

• About the concept of strategy and how strategic decisions differ from tactical decisions.

• How Babcock  & Wilcox failed to identify the Key Manufacturing Task for their nuclear pressure vessel facility and led to a financial and marketing disaster.

• How the Experience Curve works and why it impacts both Marketing and Manufacturing strategies.

• How Product Life Cycles affect manufacturing and the Key Manufacturing Task.

• How to design manufacturing processes that not only build the product well , they fit with Marketing and Financial Strategies and are appropriate to the life cycle stage.

• How to explore the often overlooked options for process technologies.

• How to tame the variety beast with Group Technology, workcells and focused factories.

• About Order-Winning Criteria and how this brings rationality, communication and understanding between Marketing and Manufacturing.

• How to identify and specify The Key Manufacturing Task.

• Capacity characteristics and how to develop a Capacity Strategy for today and the future.

• About Facility Design and how to approach this vital aspect of Manufacturing Strategy.

• About supply chains and how to develop win-win supplier policies.

• How Coprorate Culture can inhibit or enhance manufacturing processes.

• Do you need a world-class maintenance organization? Maybe not and here is why....

• How your plant's utility systems (Electrical, Air, Water) affect process design.

• How to resolve frequent conflict between Marketing, Finance and Manufacturing.

• How to incorporate Lean and Six Sigma into your strategic thinking.

Program Outline

1.0  Introduction

1.1  The Concept of Strategy

1.2  Strategic Issues In Manufacturing

2.0  The Great Nuclear Fizzle (Case Study)

3.0 Underlying Concepts

3.1 Learning & Experience Curves

3.2 Product Life Cycles

3.0  Issues In Manufacturing Strategy

3.1  Structure

• Process Design
• Process Technology/Flexibility/Scale
• Workflow & Work Unit Focus
• Key  Manufacturing Task(s)
• Focused Factories
• Capacity Strategy
• Facility Design
• The Supply Chain

3.2  Infrastructure

4.0  Critical Interfaces

4.1  Marketing

4.2  Human Resources

4.3  Finance

4.4 Materials Management

5.0  Benefit of Manufacturing Strategy

6.0  Lean, Six Sigma and Manufacturing Strategy

6.1 A Brief History

6.2 Compare & Contrast

7.0  Formal Manufacturing Strategy Development

8.0  Conclusion