Inventory & Space
Reduction of inventory is one of the main expectations when a new customer contacts us.
Do you have a real idea of how is your business managed?
Do you know, for how many items are you keeping higher stock than their 3-month consumption?
For these items the stock turnover is less than 4 times a year (12 months of consumption are divided by the size of the current stock – if more than 3 months = turnover is less than 4 times a year).
“The more inventory a company has, the less likely they will have what they need.” (Taiichi Ohno)
TIME = INVENTORY = MONEY
Now, you can imagine how your warehouse could look if 100% of the items (components + work in progress + finished parts) are turned through 40 times a year (almost every week). This is the normal value achieved by our customers when using on-line overview and visualization of priorities in IKS e-kanban.
For those who like to count MONEY, we have another perspective on the same situation.
I have finished products with 5% of profit when I do sold them. If I replenish my inventory once every 3 months = 4 times a year; my annually released profit will be 4x 5% = 20%.
But, if I manage my stock better almost once a week = 40 times a yearly; I can gain 40x 5% = 200%! The same impact is on the amount of released cash that would be frozen in stocks and radically improve your cash flow.
You have to reduce all deliveries lead times to your internal or external customers and take the benefit of online priorities in each process step. With minimal inventory stock and very short delivery times you will create an absolute functional dependencies to all participants and their mutual relationship must be 100% fair & win-win.
Actual impact on delivery time items included in holistic IKS ekanban
With IKS ekanban you will have your inventory under control and plenty of free money for your innovations!
Staff & Labour
Nowadays, we are facing a high turnover of staff and a gradually radical loss of corporate experience. We have problems to backup all corporate experiences and fully train new team members, which may ultimately cause a dropping of service level to our end customers.
Are you firefighting all the time without break to solve the root cause?
What more, IKS ekanban can help your company to setup high level of standardisation that will be user-intuitive and a most of administrative work will be automated & paperless.
The atmosphere of your team become relaxed and support of your customers will gain a new dimension.
The online execution environment of IKS ekanban removes all unnecessary calls or emails, delays & waiting for forwarded information, or fixing typing errors entered in to IT systems.
96% of end-users says that IKS kanban is beneficial for their daily work.
We will be proud to help your team and to be the source of the support & missing skills.
100% ON TIME
Have you ever experienced, that the supplied material arrived on time according to the request date, but it was already too late for your internal or external customer!
This will never repeat again with IKS ekanban, your real time responsiveness to the urgencies of your internal & external customer and proactively support them, before they will find out that are in potential shortage of supply.
Visualization of customer urgency in IKS ekanban is perfectly developed at multiple levels. Kanban board giving actual priorities for kanban users, an early warning system alerts of upcoming shortage, or reports and graphs showing the situation from many views.
With IKS ekanban you meet the customer’s urgencies before they even know it!
Paperless
Every piece of information passed through the paper, needs hands that write or print it out = “human resources”.
Another expectation is that this paper must be passed for further processing = “time delays”.
Subsequently, this information, someone enters in to IT business systems = “risk of typing errors, typos”.
IKS ekanban with on-line data integrations in to enterprise systems can replace most of the paper administration. (Such as purchase orders, delivery advice, goods receipt, vendor billing, stock transfers, production orders, picking notes, transport orders, sales orders and customer invoices).
The only paper that should remain is the physical label of the kanban unit identification, so that the user never mis-match the items!
Another bonus in today’s digital age is the cancellation of paper archives. All your transactions are digital and can be stored in cloud data archives.
IKS ekanban, will make the “INDUSTRY 4.0” happen!
Transport
Are you solving the efficiency of transport ordering or production milk-runs?
The traditional way is well planned transport plan known in advance or covered by fixed transport agreement, but it can blocks us from fast reaction on a unexpected urgencies of customers and we are pushed in to improvisation or ineffective “extinguishing” situation.
IKS ekanban moves these boundaries to the maximal satisfaction of the customer. Shared view of actual situation in the IKS ekanban is supporting the right decisions and deliveries according to the actual needs of the customer.
We can easily setup standard rules and time windows for processing deliveries (example: at 00:00 collecting customer needs > 00:30 picking of goods > 00:40 ordering adequate size of transport vehicle).
In addition, we know which item is going to ” burn out” and can be delivered and unloaded at our customer as a first package. IKS also allows to collect or distribute multiple locations at regular intervals and maximizing material flow through multiple processes / suppliers / customers.
All IKS ekanban transactions are recorded every second, which in reality allows to manage delivery frequencies with absolute speed, limited only by physical feasibility to execute.
Rotation of returnable packaging can also be simplified and become more controllable.
At the moment of ordering the size of the transport, we can pick also the exact amount of returnable packages. Always with a 1:1 logic. For supplier I will deliver empty packages and on the way back collect full deliveries. In case of customer I deliver packaging full of goods and collect empty. You would never deal with the lack of packaging (all is calculated for whole supply chain cycle and visible to all parties) and you will eliminate the wasted cost of empty packaging distribution.
Reduce your transportation carbon foot-print in to minimum!
Continuous Improvements
We are really on the mission journey and it is not important how we call it, if it is Lean, Kaizen, Lean-Six Sigma or Operational Excellence.
Every company and service organization is willing to survive in this fast and highly comeptitve market. To grow, be innovative and still make some profit!
Only 20% of companies are able to sustain the never ending changes!
All used tools and technics should support continuous improvements of processes. But most of the companies are driven by projects with defined start, time of pending and date of completion. The project is expecting tangible benefits in very short period.
When you start “Lean” journey, you have started endless transformation of continuous improvements.
Continuous changes and improvements to the current way of working are a huge challenge for colleagues who are forced to follow these changes. Continuous improvement must be a fundamental principle of the company philosophy and shouldn’t be depending on the initiative of individuals who motivates their co-workers to accept constantly changing environment. In this case, we will face two risks: 1st effect would be personal burn-out of your initiator and the 2nd is logical return of challenged colleagues in to a comfortable stereotype, plus stronger resistance to return in to future changes.
Would you like to grow, be innovative and generate profit?
Visually and pull driven processes will help you to be more efficient, will free up your capital for innovation and help to flexible service to your customers. IKS ekanban will highlight all bottlenecks across the whole flow and all users executions.
The absence of company missions is the initial point to the failure and the reason why only less than 20% of companies are successful!
IKS supports long-term sustainability of transformation!
IT integration
In manufacturing operations we are fully focused on building customer products or providing maximal service to our customer. But they are often overloaded with excessive administration and data entries in IT systems.
That is main reason why our customers are looking for fully IT integrated solution to free-up end users from unnecessary administration.
Most of the data transactions can be fully automated and absolutely accurate in real time by using IKS ekanban.
Many of our customers appreciated the readiness of the IKS Integration Module and the sophisticated simplicity of Data Import and Export functionality.
When you are in the stage of choosing the right ekanban solution for your colleagues – keep your attention on details as how flexible and easy is correction of a mistake? Will you be alerted immediately and be able to fix it by yourself without IT assistance?
IKS ekanban is a truly professional software designed to support pull processes with kanban principle. It isn’t a substitution of the ERP business system, accounting system or personnel management system. When we do data integration, the core & full data source are enterprise systems, and only few details necessary for end-user transactions are mirrored in IKS ekanban.
A few examples of integrations:
Supplier kanban – purchase order & order receiving & consignment management IN/OUT
Transport kanban – stock transfer & material issue (assist RFID)
Production and assembly kanban – release of production order & completion of production order (import from robot or PLC)
Customer kanban – sales order & expedition of order & consignment management IN/OUT & invoicing
Kanban systems consolidation – centralised system to manage and control your own kanban plus multiple external suppliers/customers kanban systems
Standard integration scheme of IKS
IKS ekanban creates a unique ID number for each kanban unit (kanban ID – with 1D barcode /or RFID), every kanban move – scan is traceable in IKS and can be also used as a unique identification key in the enterprise system. Each transaction in IKS ekanban is provided with a timestamp including the user’s signature.
Each kanban transaction is recorded in to the IKS SQL database (containing data such as item, vendor, customer, kanban amount, kanban ID, and many more)
This new record is automatically in real-time picked up by your ERP or IT system and initiating the required change or transaction. Data can be exported also as data files like ASCII, csv, xml or txt.
We also take care of security.
Web site communication is protected by Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS). Kanban users login, is authenticated by name and password in IKS ekanban, so that unauthorized transactions are blocked and suppliers / customers can’t view each other’s data. Each transaction in IKS ekanban is provided with a timestamp including the user’s signature.
International Enterprises also requiring usage of a single login & password validated by Microsoft Active Directory (which will not allow ex-employees to log in). This function allows user to log in on the computer and click on the IKS icon to start using IKS ekanban.
A shared data folder (FTP) can be used to securely transfer data files with external customers / suppliers (function EDI or Business to Business – B2B), allowing servers to exchange data information directly under security protection (SSH key). This functionality is used for a holistic interconnection of flows with external organizations such as suppliers and customers, removing all paperwork across.
IKS ekanban application is encoded in “HTML5” format and is fully functional without any additional plug-in. 100% of IKS functionalities are available on any mobile devices such as laptop, tablet, forklift PC terminal and handheld reader with display.
IKS will make real-time visible standard for all processes!