Improving customer order visibility to enable improved planning and decision making

Abstract

The General Purpose Drives organization of ABB Switzerland does not capture sufficient data on the movement of customer orders through the production process to make efficient decisions on where to allocate improvement resources, where to focus tactical attention, or how to plan for subsequent customer orders. This thesis is focused on development and implementation of a visual dashboard for displaying production information to enable easier fact-based decision making and improved planning. The final deliverable is a dashboard, updated daily, which provides information to three main user groups: 1. Project Managers - Show where current open orders are in the order cycle process 2. Process Owners - Report throughput time for each process step 3. Production Planners - Display current factory load and available production slots After launching the new tool, users can pull up the dashboard and immediately identify which projects need attention and the status of every order. Additionally, the factory load information is accessible for all users to reference. Immediately upon implementing the dashboard, the amount of time it took for the management team to quote an achievable lead time commitment for a new order was reduced from about two days to a few hours.