You need to configure three things: Product families, List of SKU (products), non working days calendar. In this order.

Everyday you can import the list of work orders and OTIF100 will tell you what orders must be processed and what priority each order has. Follow these two instructions and two things will happen: there is no need for urgent changes and most probably production will flow faster and smoother, achieving ~100% DDP.

We assume that you already have some sort of system to generate work orders, being an ERP or a legacy system, or simply a worksheet, you will already have all the fields we need, and the capability to automate the process to produce this file in Excel or CSV format.

When you load your data, OTIF100 will give you a set of instructions in DO THIS:

• FREEZE UNLESS RELEASED BY LOAD CONTROL: You are using capacity too soon to process this order. If you stop processing this order till the recommended release date, you are freeing capacity for other order to flow faster. Even if a resource is idle and you can process this order, it is better to wait until the release date arrives because otherwise many orders will find resources busy with these orders and they will need to wait in line: the opposite of flow. If you are using Load Control already, you may have seen a message of low load, recommending the release of more orders. In this case, you can choose what orders to release before Recommended Release Date, which is good to utilize your capacity at full.
  

• RELEASE THIS ORDER ASAP: You haven't started processing an order whose Recommended Release Date already arrived or, worse, passed. You are increasing the chances for that order to be late. The time from sale to recommended release date is perfect to ensure the Full-Kit to release the orders when the date arrives. Put a procedure in place to ensure Full-Kits (a check list of materials, consumables, tools, blueprints and whatever is required to process an order), and this checks should be done prioritized by Recommended Release Dates (not due dates). Usually all the full-kits can be ready before release dates without any hassle, as a standard operating procedure. If you don't have the full-kit on release date, then it is urgent.

• DO NOT PROCESS YET: This order shouldn't be released yet and, according to data, it is not. Do nothing with it except ensuring Full-Kit.

• PROCESS ACCORDING TO ITS COLOR: In each work center you can find several orders waiting. To ensure a smooth flow in the right sequence, choose first orders with higher priority. The order is: black (if any, you shouldn't have), red, yellow and green. Note that in the software, orders to be frozen are green because you don't want to explain a worker why you released something ahead of time. If you did, you surely had your reasons, so don't explain.
  

README / LEEME

GUÍA DE USUARIO / USER'S GUIDE

GUÍA SFTP / SFTP GUIDE

The order is: 1) Families, 2) SKU, 3) Non working days. Prepare your worksheets first, with extension XLS or CSV (XLSX wouldn't always work). As you can see in this video, it takes less than three minutes to configure these three tables. Afterwards, when something is different, you can go and delete, modify or create new families, sku or non working days, or just delete all and reload.

NOTE: In SKU it is a good idea to include the description, although you can load your work orders with a different description. There are good reasons for this.

Once the configuration is done, we can load our work orders. In the video we show the manual procedure.

Automatic uploading through SFTP is incompatible with this manual procedure. It is also unnecessary to use the External ID column in the case of automation.

A brief demonstration of how to select, group and review work orders:

NOTE: The video shows a filter "Decision required" that was replaced by "On Alert".

Analyzing Color Profile of the orders:

OTIF100 was not conceived to store history. Its purpose is to be simple to help you make decisions in production. All the historical data that you want to store can be exported.

There some fields that are not immediately available for export. Learn how to choose the right data and how to organize it before exporting it to Excel or a CSV file.

There is only one issue recalculating things in OTIF100: when the calendar for non working days is changed, the affected orders will show the change in the recommended release date but they will not show a change in color or status of required attention.

Also, when it is a new day, colors are not automatically updated.

To update colors, use the menu item 'Buffer status update' under Load Control or the contextual menu selecting one work order. Colors are automatically updated every six hours anyway.

'External_id' is a field for an unique identifier for the record in each file. When importing data (as well as exporting), External_id will be very useful to avoid duplicates.

For each file (see the sample files for more clarity), there is one field (or column) that is unique:

Families: External_id = Family

SKUs: External_id =  SKU

NWDS: External_id =  nwd

Work Orders: External_id =  wo_id

If you don't include in your worksheets the column for External_id you still can use OTIF100, however you will need to delete all data and upload the file again.

When you use External_id, you don't need to delete the old data; just import the updated worksheet and the records in OTIF100 will be updated accordingly.

NOTE 1: When you delete a record (a line) from the worksheet and import, the deleted record will remain in OTIF100, so you must mark it as finished in OTIF100 manually.

NOTE 2: When work orders are uploaded with an automated process through SFTP, you don't need External ID column, and besides the 'missing orders' in the file are assumed to be finished, so they are automatically finished. This last feature means also that files must be uploaded with ALL current work orders in one file. Partial files will result in marking as finished all missing work orders.

LOAD CONTROL is the heart of the system.

We needed buffers and colors to start taking control of the flow. However, taking control of the capacity and the load enables your company to take control of the promise you give to your market. And delivering on the promise is what builds a reputation.

Load Control answers two questions:

1. What date is reasonable to commit to deliver an order at quoting time?
OTIF100 answers this question showing the possible dates at the active Capacity Constrained Resources (CCRs). Note that if you only send data for two CCRs, OTIF100 will display only two CCRs.

For the active CCRs you have the possibility of combining the CCRs to get the most constrained date, by editing and marking only the CCRs where the product that your customer is requesting a date goes through.

NOTE 1: Accepting the requested date from a customer is not mandatory for you. It is your choice what date you will promise. Load control helps making this decision so your DDP-Due Date Performance will not suffer.

2. Should we anticipate the release of some orders?
The answer is yes. When promising dates, it is very likely that many orders will be concentrated on some dates and none for other dates. In this case, the program for releasing orders will be irregular on a daily basis.

The signal to anticipate some orders is when Load on CCRs (all of them) is below 80%-90%. Releasing another order will increase the load on one or more of the CCRs and this will tell us that we are not going to waste any capacity where it matters: the CCR that dictates flow.

OTIF100 shows the load in green for the CCRs where there is room to release more WIP, and in red where OTIF100 advises no more WIP for now.

Target WIP is set at 7 days by default (there is no way we can guess your buffers), but the guiding rule is to set it at the average time buffer considering all families. Once set, it is not advisable to modify it frequently. Note that target WIP can be set separately for each CCR.

NOTE 2: OTIF100 provides up to six CCRs to be defined. The CCRs can be part of only one production line or, on the other extreme, be six independent production lines, or a combination. When there are two or more CCRs in a production line, that means that the orders are processed by all these CCRs. Therefore, releasing more WIP will affect all of them. The advise is not to release more WIP when a CCR is already red, in spite of the others being in green.

NOTE 1
Calculated load depends on Parts Per Hour. If you observe that usually you are releasing ahead of time even when calculated date is beyond desired date, then it is possible that your "parts per hour" are below actual capacity of the line. Increase these by 5% and see what happens for at least a week.
Warning: if parts per hour are above reality, you will be promising dates impossible to deliver. Therefore, it is better for you to be on the safe side and releasing earlier from time to time than committing to impossible loads, which launches your plant on a negative spiral.

NOTE 2
If a product is not processed by any CCR, it is called "free product", because it will not be competing for capacity in its way through the plant. These should always be released on their recommended release date, because there is no gain in releasing earlier.

NOTE 3
There is no need to have six CCRs. This is the maximum number of CCRs allowed by OTIF100. If you have a clear "bottleneck", that is your only and one CCR per production line. Only if you see that there are products that consume much more capacity than others in another resource, but those products are rarely sold and produced, then that resource will be rarely more loaded than the usual CCR. Maybe it is a good idea to include that other resource as CCR 2, in case that sales mix include a big portion of that SKU and you don't want to promise dates that you cannot deliver. This rationale applies to any production line, so OTIF100 should fit the needs of any plant with even two or three production lines. When there is no doubt, OTIF100 can handle up to six production lines.

Additions are: 1) Parts per hour in SKU; and 2) Quantity Before x in work orders.

Quantity before x (x is 1, 2 ... 6) is the number of units of the order that have not been processed by the respective CCR yet. If you cannot extract this information from your system, just repeat quantity, which will introduce a little distortion. It is better if you can report the right number.

In case you have a mix of MTO and MTA orders, you need to reserve capacity for MTO, so the remainder will be used in MTA.

LOAD CONTROL is the heart of the system and you can make decisions based on this information. There are two decisions to make on the operation:
1. What orders to release (or to freeze)
2. What priority to follow
In this video we look in more detail the first one.
An ugrade on Relasing/Freezing orders:

New filters to see what orders are loading each CCR:

When an order was finished on the shop floor, you don't want it visible anymore in OTIF100 because there are no more decisions to make about it in production.
You can either delete it or finish it.
When you delete it, the order is simply deleted and no record is saved.
When you finish it, the order is deleted from (current) Work Orders and it is added to the history to further analyze the performance in terms of OTIF and how often orders are finished in each color. You can even analyze OTIF per different criteria as customer or product. All this is done per date. The record is saved with the current date and it saves the current status.
You finish several orders at a time.
If an old order (already in history) is uploaded again (for example, there was a mistake finishing it, or it returned for a quality claim), history remains until you finish it again, and it saves the last status.

 

You can choose your language between English and Spanish.
There are some messages and instructions that are only in English, so Spanish speakers can look in the tutorials for the explanations when needed.
This video shows how to change the language and how to request a new password: