How do you produce higher margins, off lower investment and overhead, faster and more reliably than your competitors?
Ensemble Partners takes a broad view of production. It is not limited to the making of tangible goods but can also refer to the creation of intangible services. An organisation can produce cars, home loans, insurance policies, a claim settlement, a customer order, a consignment, spare parts and anything else that requires specific inputs and the execution of sequential processes to deliver a desired output.
Ensemble's production systems deliver sustainable competitve advantage to your organisation by enabling bankable reliability, in best of class lead times, with less inventory/work-in-process (WIP).
Published results demonstrate that by implementing Ensemble's production systems, mean improvements levels you could expect are:
- Increases in Revenue or Throughput often of a substantial magnitude, with a mean of 68%.·
- Reductions in Inventory levels of a large magnitude, with a mean of 49%.
- Reductions in Lead-time of a substantial magnitude, with a mean of 70%.
- Reductions in Cycle-time of a substantial magnitude, with a mean of 65%.
- Improvements in Due-Date-Performance, with a mean of 60%.
Whether you produce goods or services, you may feel that you must compromise market responsiveness with cost competitiveness. Ensemble helps you to create production systems that deliver cost effectiveness whilst simultaneously delighting customers with exceptional due-date-performance within extraordinarily short lead times. Replacing the tyranny of cost leadership versus customer service with the genius of being able to achieve both, gives you real price setting power.
Ensemble Partners can help your organisation implement and operate a tried and tested production methodology called Drum-Buffer-Rope (DBR). This methodology is the application of the Theory of Constraints to production systems. It is designed to ensure that all operations are synchronised to maximise overall Throughput and not sub-optimise the efficiency of the component parts. It is based on the common sense idea that any system produces only as much as its constraint and therefore any increase in constraint capacity is immediately an improvement for the system as a whole. The DBR approach to maximising Throughput can be encapsulated by the simple genius of the Five Focusing Steps applied as below.
- The constraint of the operations environment is identified
- Production scheduling is based on the availability of the constraint
- All other resources are scheduled to support the availability of the constraint
- New work is released only when it is needed
Why is it called Drum-Buffer-Rope?
The Drum refers to the critically constrained resource which beats the rhythm to which the whole organisation is synchronised.
The Buffer is a time based shock absorber which takes account of process variability to ensure that the Drum is never starved of work. This protects the Throughput of the organisation.
The Rope controls the release of work into the system in such a way that the Drum is fully utilised and there is no unnecessary creation of work in progress (WIP).
With more than a decade of experience, Ensemble will help you to redefine what is reasonable and possible with the human and material resources at your disposal. Using the Ensemble DBR production management approach you will be able to increase revenues, reduce operating costs and minimise risk, making your invested capital work smarter.
Call us on +61 2 9387 3955 to find out more.
