CRP paired up with Lydia Amakoud, Antoine Laye & Arnaud Lepretre - a team of three French students undertaking a Masters in Engineering & Management of Manufacturing Systems or Masters in Manufacturing Consultancy. They were supervised by Professor Richard Weston. Their project was to improve the visibility of CRP’s Operational Processes and this was quickly narrowed down to consider the journey between receiving a customer order and launching manufacturing within the factory.
They first spent several weeks learning how CRP went about this process – and educating CRP in it as well! Here they used a modelling methodology called CIMOSA which breaks down processes and decision making in a very logical manner. From this an understanding of all of the business interactions can be had and areas for improved communication can be targeted.
However, not contect with just doing the consultants thing and producing a list of recommendations, they embarked on the much harder part and embarked on implementation. Here they created an Access database to be used in real time between the logistics, sales and engineering teams. This has created a visual system where the workflow can be viewed, to see where any bottlenecks are and to see that we are meeting our performance targets. The system is now well bedded in and we are considering the enxt enhancements. So overall we would recommend the experience of having some budding young consultants to experiment on your business! If you are interested in offering such placements please get in touch and we can provide contact details.
