Meet customer deadlines by simplifying shop floor planning and execution with Protected Flow Manufacturing (PFM), which prevents work from being released too early, reduces the time jobs spend waiting, protects customer promise dates, and provides a clear priority for each operation.
It does so by accurately predicting when each job will arrive at a specific work center, monitoring risk, anticipating variability, and determining what needs to be worked on next.
Protect Commitments
PFM lets you make customer commitments with confidence. It does so by automatically adjusting the threat level (risk of being late) when unexpected variables arise to ensure all job deadlines are met.
Shop Floor Scheduling Made Easy
PFM provides a clear priority to each operation, without complex finite scheduling. Instead of trying to plan the use of each resource into future time periods, PFM dynamically in real time calculates the threat level (risk of being late) of every work order and uses it to prioritize work in the optimum way.
Bring Scheduling and Visibility to Any ERP
PFM seamlessly integrates to your existing ERP. It enables better flow and improves on-time delivery to provide complete transparency between financial performance and production.
Increase Profitability
PFM enables you to capture more business, charge a premium for shorter lead times, and provides faster cash velocity — a shorter time between paying for materials and collecting from customers.
Seamless Integration
PFM can seamlessly be integrated or embedded directly into your existing ERP system in order to augment and extend its functionality.
Easy to Set Up. Easy to Maintain.
PFM does not require the high data accuracy and data maintenance of common schedulers. Its revolutionary approach allows you to quickly gain visibility over the status of every job and begin improving on-time delivery in a matter of days.
Anticipate Issues
Every shop has challenges. Common schedulers assume that everything will go as planned and quickly become out-of-date when it doesn’t. PFM knows that unexpected things will happen and dynamically adjusts resource assignments in real time as they happen.
See the Future Before it Happens
PFM not only clearly shows you how to execute work every day, it also simulates the future to show you what jobs are predicted to be late well before they are. This allows you to take the necessary steps to get them out on time.
Optimize Large & Small Jobs
Traditional scheduling will prioritize work by due date. PFM looks at due date and job duration to ensure that longer jobs are started on time (before shorter jobs that are due sooner). This optimizes resources across all jobs and delivers every job on time rather then just the one that is due soonest.
Eliminate Expediting
Expediting jobs is both time consuming and costly. PFM eliminates the need for it. By monitoring work completed across all jobs in real time, PFM knows which jobs to expedite without requiring manual analysis.
The results were immediate. We went from four weeks late to three weeks late to two weeks late to one week late. And now, I can look out one month and see that we’re going to be one day, two days late on this job, but on time for that job.
We don’t "kick" all of the jobs to the shop floor at once like we used to. Putting too many jobs onto the shop floor prematurely burns up machine time. You utilize capacity before it needs to be used by putting all the jobs out on the shop floor at once.
In the first couple months using PFM, our concentration was to just get rid of the backlog of late orders. Now, since February 2018, we’ve run four months in a row where we’ve been 90% or better on time with all of the orders coming through the door. That’s a dramatic turnaround!
PFM's Core Features & Benefits
Real Time Shop Floor Execution
PFM’s foundation is its ability to prioritize work in real time rather then require you to run and re-run a schedule. This puts the latest, most accurate information into the hands of the people that need it. Job assignments are understood, trusted, and done in the right priority.
Predictive Analytics
Traditional scheduling solutions “assign” future capacity to jobs and then need to be re-run over and over as unplanned events happen. PFM instead “simulates” the use of your capacity and shows you what jobs are predicted to have problems and at what resources these problems may occur at. This gives you a clear picture of the future, which enables you to implement an action plan in order to deliver jobs on time.
Protective Time Buffers
PFM plans for unknown problems that can disrupt a static schedule. It does so by protecting the job with a time buffer that can be calculated based on:
- A ration of actual time to buffer time
- The sum of different size buffers based on the operations required
Aerospace & Defense
- Engineering with CAD integration
- Engineering change control
- Specifications and data "flow down" for ITAR, DFAR, etc.
- Actual job costing
- Project Management with Earned Value Management and milestone reporting
Automotive Manufacturing
- Configuration management
- Serial and lot control
- Design and engineering
- Capacity planning & scheduling (Lean, TOC, JIT)
- Actual costing
Electronics & High-Tech
- Alternate item on bill of materials (BOM)
- Item cross reference (supplier and manufacturer)
- Approved vendors and manufacturer lists
- Supply chain visibility with Web based portals
- Reference designators
Oil & Gas
- Strengthen Your Supply Chain
- Sophisticated Project Management
- Connect Service Efforts to Operations
- Localization & Financial Accounting Visibility
Field Service, Maintenance & Repair
- Improve Customer Satisfaction & First Time Fix Rate
- Reduce Days Sales Outstanding (DSO)
- Optimize Routing of Field Service Techs
- Support for Depot Repair, Break-Fix & More
- Offer Managed Service Contracts
Furniture & Fixtures
- Industry Expert Partners
- Increase Quote Win Rate
- Improve Planning & Scheduling
- Cut Operational Costs
- Shorten Product Development Lifecycles
Industrial Machinery & Equipment
- Win More Business
- Meet Customer Delivery Expectations
- Increase Velocity of Spare Part Sales
- Collaborate With Suppliers & Customers
- Leave Your Competitors Behind
Industrial Manufacturing
- End-to-end customer relationship, sales, purchasing, performance, and financial management
- Estimating with multiple quantity breaks
- Integrated capacity planning (Lean, TOC, JIT) with unlimited "what-if" scenarios
- Material planning with real-time visibility of demand and supply
- Cost control (actual, average, standard)
Medical Device Manufacturing
- End-to-end customer relationship, sales, purchasing, performance, and financial management
- Estimating with multiple quantity breaks
- Integrated capacity planning (Lean, TOC, JIT) with unlimited "what-if" scenarios
- Material planning with real-time visibility of demand and supply
- Cost control (actual, average, standard)
Metal, Glass, & Plastic Fabrication
- Purpose-Built ERP
- Estimate with Confidence
- Improve Delivery Performance
- Paperless Real-Time Shop Floor Data Collection
- The Right Materials at the Right Time
Process Manufacturing
- Tailor-make your formulations for maximum efficiency
- QC activities management with industry-aligned compliance labeling & reports
- Precision control over batch production, including by-products
- Define and monitor losses at each stage
- Dynamic ingredient adjustment to meet product objectives