Frequently Asked Questions
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OTIF100 is as simple as it can be. You need a user that can configure, load data and change things. And you need to provide information to many users who should not change anything.
To achieve these goals, there is one Admin and one User per production line. You can provide access as Admin or as User to as many people as you wish. There can be tens of people logged in as User simultaneously, using the same email and password. We don't advice to do the same as Admin because this could create distortions when two or more people change things without coordination.
OTIF100 is a system to help making decisions to achieve 100% On Time In Full on the promised due dates. So if you want to use it, you need a due date for the order, and you can simulate your plant as an external supplier, setting the due dates as you would with an outsourced manufacturer.
That said, in Theory Of Constraints we have developed another way of managing production to produce 100% availability instead of meeting a promised date. We call this MTA - Make-To-Availability (in contrast with MTO - Make-To-Order).
If your business is pure MTA, consider using FILLRATE100 instead. Learn more here: https://fillrate100.com
It is a new functionality that you can load MTA orders, where you replace due date with a stock buffer and on hand stock for the SKU. (Due date still needs a value to avoid errors, however it is not used). These data will tell OTIF100 that the order is MTA and it will give the color for priorities.
In the case that your business is a mix of manufacturing on demand with items on stock, in load control you can assign a percentage of capacity to MTO, so MTA orders can use capacity without jeopardizing on time delivery.
The concept of releasing an order to production is a new one, because the traditional way is to start working as soon as possible. In that sense, all the orders are released even if they are waiting for capacity in the first resource.
OTIF100 needs to know when an order was actually started. That date is ARD - Actual Release Date. If you don't know the exact date and the order is being produced, just put an approximate date. If the order is on hold (you will not allow to process it yet), leave this blank.
Definitely not!
You can start without any capacity measurement TODAY getting Scheduled Release Dates and colors. Obey these two pieces of information and you will experience instant improvement in productivity.
First of all, Parts_Per_Hour is the way to measure capacity consumption. And it is only relevant where capacity is scarcest, what we call CCR - Capacity Constrained Resource.
Second consideration, actual capacity in your CCR is highly determined by the amount of WIP - work in progress, so the first action should be to control WIP.
Now we can discuss methods. I will offer two different approaches to this measurement, which is fundamental for Load Control:
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When producing in steady state some SKU, measure how many parts are produced in an hour. You need to do this several times to get an average. It is time consuming and hard to know whether these numbers are accurate enough.
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My favourite method:
| Take your portfolio of products and divide them in groups according to average time in minutes that takes to process X units in the CCR. |
| Then, assign some average times T (min) to these groups. |
| Now you can calculate PPH = 60 * X / T for each group (and hence for each SKU). |
| Finally, use these PPH for each work order in a period (3, 6 , 12 months, whatever data you have available) and calculate how many hours did all the work orders consume (according to these PPH). |
| Organize all these data in a worksheet and make a pivot table to assess how many hours per week were consumed according to these PPH. There is an assumption here: CCR was busy all the time. If variations of consumed hours are beyond 50%, you may want to check again your assessment of average time per group, or check whether actual worked hours varied from one week to the other. |
| You need to know how many hours your plant worked each week in your sample. And now we introduce the Correcting Factor - CF. CF must be multiplied by PPH for each SKU. |
| Starting with a CF = 1, if calculated hours are greater than actual hours, this means that PPH are too low so increase CF, and vice versa. |
| My advice is to set CF so calculated hours are 10-15% over actual hours. This is more conservative and the dates calculated by Load Control will be easier to meet. Don't worry about selling less because your production will not follow these PPH and everyday you will have room for more orders as the plant finishes them. |
in order of taking advantage of load control to calculate safe dates, you need at least one CCR per production line.
When a change in the product mix makes the CCR to shift from one resource to another, you may need 2 or at most 3 CCRs in a production line.
OTIF100 provides 6 CCRs to be configured. If you need only one, use only one.
You can combine CCRs to manage from one production line to a maximum of 6 production lines, with one CCR each.
Configuration of a CCR means two things: a) assigning hours per day and capacity for MTO (default is 100%); and b) assigning the appropriate value to PPH to each SKU that goes through that resource.
Each production line is governed by one CCR in a given period. However, some SKUs may consume more capacity in one resource and less in another whereas another SKU is the opposite. When product mix in a period varies it may result in CCR shifting from one resource to another.
To have a dynamic method to calculate possible dates to promise, OTIF100 allows up to have more than one resource to be potential CCRs. When product mix changes, CCRs may change, and OTIF100 will show the correct information at all times.
The ideal situation is to have only one CCR per production line. With two alternative CCRs you are covered for 99% of possibilities. The third is for those that want to be absolutely sure.
When you are using the automation to upload the work orders, all the orders that are not in the current uploaded file will be automatically considered as finished.