If you always do what you always did, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.
Henry Ford
In multi-workflow discrete production environments, products go through the production process in a more-or-less linear fashion, but different products will take different paths from start to finish. This is a particularly challenging environment to achieve optimum flow and low queue times because the traditional Kanban method of pulling products, or batches of products, through the facility does not work well. And when that challenge is added to intermittent demand for products, or an engineer-to-order production model, traditional push/MRP dispatching was the current state of the art prior to the dawn of Vortex™ technology.
The re-entrant workflows in a semiconductor, and certain machining, fabrication facility is a good example of the production operations that have been “left behind” in the rest of industry’s pursuit of lean manufacturing goals. Small pilot operations have been developed but never fulfilled to their fullest. Now, with Vortex™’s revolutionary, workflow agnostic, approach to demand-pull production dispatching, there is finally a path to lean manufacturing in these industries.
