Control Tower Dashboard for More Resilient Supply Chain Operational Planning in Manufacturing Industry
The growing uncertainty caused by economic crises, the Covid-19 pandemic, and geopolitical developments over the past decades has provided valuable lessons for companies, particularly those in manufacturing. Companies must respond swiftly and appropriately to fluctuations in supply and demand. For instance, when demand drops, companies need to rapidly scale down operations and increase them again as demand recovers. These changes require a reassessment of long-term operational plans. A key role of the supply chain is to enable companies to shift focus from cost efficiency to maximizing throughput using the same infrastructure and assets.
Poor responsiveness to market supply and demand will have a cascading effect on related divisions, such as delayed product deliveries or halted production operations. In today’s digital era, one solution to address these challenges is the use of data analytics, which provides more accurate and reliable information. In recent years, companies leveraging data analytics to identify solutions and make recommendations for specific business challenges have demonstrated improved clarity in operational production planning and enhanced supply chain resilience. On the other hand, many companies that have not adopted such approaches in their supply chains experience persistent issues with operational production planning.
To maximize the benefits of this approach, companies can consider optimizing tools and processes into a responsive control tower dashboard. This recommendation is supported by Hossein Aghai-Khozani, a consultant at McKinsey. One of the key advantages of such a dashboard is its ability to centrally monitor the control functions of each supply chain role within the company, enabling faster decision-making when issues arise.
Designing a Responsive Control Tower Dashboard
To develop this dashboard, companies need to focus on five key steps:
1. Implementing a pull system for demand-driven production operations.
2. Bridging the gap between long-term planning and daily production activities using tools like heijunka.
3. Improving communication flow between teams.
4. Understanding operational production constraints.
5. Utilizing scenario analysis to address critical “what-if” questions.
By following this design, manufacturing companies can improve supply chain throughput by 10–15% in the short term without any changes to their existing assets (McKinsey, 2022).
Implementing a Pull System for Demand-Driven Production Operations
The foundation of all operational planning relies on understanding customer demand. Companies must quickly and accurately translate this demand into production sequences and volumes. A responsive control tower dashboard facilitates this process by enabling automated adjustments to production work orders based on customer demand changes. This system accelerates decision-making and helps companies handle fluctuating demand, reducing the risk of delivery delays for other customers.
Bridging Long-Term Planning and Daily Production Activities with Heijunka
Effective operational planning addresses the gap between long-term production plans and their concrete implementation. A responsive control tower dashboard can translate long-term plans into detailed operational schedules, automatically accounting for dynamic conditions and complex operational constraints.
One method that aligns long-term production planning with daily operations is heijunka or production leveling. This method ensures that all production processes are balanced across conditions to avoid the uncertainties of fluctuating customer demand. By using heijunka, production times for goods are calculated while considering workload, inventory, and product variation based on order volumes. Heijunka acts as the “brain” of production control, helping companies manage ever-changing customer demand.
Enhancing Communication Between Teams with a Responsive Dashboard
A responsive control tower dashboard facilitates information flow between marketing, PPIC, purchasing, and production divisions. These divisions provide crucial data for supply chain planning and form the basis for data analysis in decision-making. For example, if a sudden change in production capacity occurs due to machine failure, an operational planning tool ensures all relevant divisions are informed. However, a responsive dashboard actively directs and synchronizes decisions across all divisions, guiding them toward the company’s ideal targets. Actions may include revising product marketing strategies, adjusting pricing, or restructuring the internal supply chain.
Understanding Production Constraints
In manufacturing, deviations from initial operational production plans often occur. These include forced production halts when operators are reassigned to more urgent tasks or plans that cannot be executed due to other operational constraints. Such disruptions require the PPIC division to review and adjust production activities. However, the PPIC’s solutions may not always align with the optimal strategies for other divisions or the company as a whole. A responsive control tower dashboard can help identify and address operational constraints, providing solutions that align with the needs of all divisions.
Using Scenario Analysis for Critical “What-If” Questions
To develop optimal solutions for operational changes, the PPIC division must implement procedures that simulate, analyze, and evaluate various scenarios for production planning and scheduling. These procedures often involve addressing “what-if” questions, which require input from marketing, customers, and third parties to support optimal decision-making.
For instance, a pharmaceutical company increased its overall production throughput and ensured timely deliveries by using a responsive dashboard. The dashboard provided the ability to simulate scenarios, such as handling rush orders or production operator shortages, allowing the company to maintain efficiency and meet customer needs.
Challenges in Demand Fluctuations Across Divisions
As an operations excellence practitioner and supply chain analyst in a manufacturing company, I have observed that sudden fluctuations in customer demand often create routine challenges across divisions:
• Production Division: Capacity planning adjustments become an issue since adding operators or production machinery cannot be done immediately.
• PPIC Division: Production planning changes become problematic due to varying product component buffer levels and the need to revise production sequences to avoid delivery delays.
• Marketing Division: Changes in production planning require a review of delivery contract agreements with customers.
• Procurement Division: Planning adjustments are challenging because suppliers may not be ready to provide the required components promptly.
To address these challenges, companies need to design a responsive control tower dashboard to anticipate these issues optimally.
Integrating MRP Systems with a Pull Production System
The first step in implementing this approach is to integrate the company’s MRP system with the pull production system concept. For many manufacturing companies, MRP systems are already commonly used. These systems handle customer demand data, BOM information, inventory tracking, component orders to suppliers, work orders for production, and inventory releases for production needs.
However, successful MRP implementation requires that each division’s PIC be prepared to operate the system effectively. Many companies face readiness issues among employees, both in terms of capability and workplace culture. Implementing a pull system on the production floor complements and enhances MRP systems.
To implement a pull system, the production division must have clear data on line or work center capacity for each product type. This enables the production division to prioritize work orders in the MRP system and request that PPIC release work orders based on production work center capacity. Additionally, the production division can monitor inventory levels on the production floor after work orders are released and establish inventory buffers.
The pull system reduces excessive inventory on the production floor, minimizes product delivery delays, and improves supplier responsiveness when inventory falls below buffer levels. For more detailed pull system activities, the production division should apply heijunka in each work center.
After integrating the MRP system and pull system, the second step in designing a responsive control tower dashboard is to create a list of solutions from all relevant divisions based on potential constraints arising from system limitations. These solutions must be discussed collaboratively by all divisions using scenario analysis to address a series of “what-if” questions.
Common examples in the manufacturing industry include:
• “What if a machine in work center A breaks down during peak demand?”
• “What if a component from supplier B has quality issues just before delivery to the customer?”
• “What if the work order request to PPIC cannot be fulfilled due to a sudden drop in customer demand, even though the production division has already allocated operators according to the initial capacity plan?”
• And other company-specific “what-if” questions.
Having predefined solutions for each supply chain integration issue allows the company to quickly determine the optimal response to any challenge. The final step in designing a responsive control tower dashboard is automating all production systems using the agreed-upon solutions. At this stage, key indicators must be developed for each process input in the integrated MRP and pull production system to address the constraints and solutions outlined earlier.
For example:
If the production division’s work order cannot be fulfilled by PPIC due to a sudden drop in customer demand, the system should automatically adjust the input quantity for production. A key indicator in this process is the daily input quantity for work center A. If the quantity falls below the predefined tolerance, the dashboard system will check daily quantities at other work centers that exceed their capacity tolerances. It will then recommend reallocating some operators from work center A to the overburdened work center.
The complexity of such a dashboard system is undoubtedly high, as it requires detailed operational data for every process in the relevant divisions. For example:
• In the production division, reallocating operators requires line balancing in the affected work center, along with multi-skilled operators to handle different processes.
• The second step of scenario analysis with “what-if” questions is critical in determining whether the responsive control tower dashboard becomes a highly useful tool or not.
• Designing solutions for “what-if” questions requires input from field experts and references to best practices in manufacturing.
A company’s ability to respond quickly and accurately to supply and demand uncertainties is crucial in today’s unstable market conditions. A responsive control tower dashboard can be one of the solutions companies use to optimize their operations.
In my opinion, when such a dashboard system operates optimally, decision-making in operational and supply chain activities will become faster and more accurate. This speed and precision in decision-making will provide companies with a competitive edge and enhance supply chain resilience.
