Howdy!
My client’s industrial services company has begun a transition towards managing outsourced manufacturing projects. We need help.
Traditionally, they have provided services in the form of a metal finishing process performed on steel components. This process was often one very small piece of the puzzle — the part would often have other processes performed by other vendors including machinists, painters, polishers, etc. before final assembly, and during final assembly this part maybe only one small component of the customer’s finished product.
Because of the complexity of managing these seemingly trivial projects, the customers (manufacturers) have gradually started to farm out the entire process to my client. So, they are now buying raw goods and managing the processing from start to finish, to and from various sub-contractors and eventually selling the finished part to the customer. The customer loves it becasue it’s alleviated a lot of headaches for them and theywant to push more and more of these jobs off in this fashion.
We need a solution for handling this “Simple Wide Area Manufacturing” while still maintaining the core job shop business. The issues are similar to regular manufacturing with the added complexities of shipping and routing to other vendors, reporting on inventory quantities at all vendors and being able to quickly and accurately take an inventory at these widespread sites to avoid the “rob Peter to pay Paul” syndrome of handling scrap by using parts from the next incoming order.
Any suggestions for good reading material, software solutions or other sources of information to help us deal with this issue?
TIA
-Barry
