MANUFACTURING
Maintaining OTIF during times of growth
Marcus Wright, manufacturing director
Production Area before restructure D
elivering a product or service against an agreed timeline is necessary for the health and prosperity of a company. Therefore, many companies use On-Time-In-Full Delivery (OTIF) as a standard metric for measuring quality and customer satisfaction. Usually, this metric can be set between 80 percent and 100 percent when delivering products as a good measurement standard. However, most companies will place the benchmark above this, using 90-95 percent as a target. The metric is already challenging to achieve when the facility produces a product that is small challenging when manufacturing products bespoke to the customer’s needs. To meet the target of 95 percent OTIF, MPE’s facility splits its production lines into internal production cost centres and runs them as individual suppliers. Treated like external providers, these centres produce treated as the customer. This treatment of production lines allows for strategic analysis, identifying production bottlenecks, resource requirements and component delays. This approach enables the complete kitting of a product before it moves down the assembly assembly has the advantage of dedicated component stock. Therefore, there is little due to a lack of components such as a
Production Area after restructure
screw, washer or nut. This methodology dramatically improves OTIF. However, during periods of growth or change, this metric can easily slip as it faced such a dilemma in late 2022, three years after the COVID Pandemic; MPE’s production was not showing any signs of returning to pre-COVID levels and the year-on-year growth meant that the current impact OTIF, delivery lead times and working conditions.
MPE has resided in its current location for over 40 years and has become landlocked, not allowing any scope to expand outwards. Therefore, it has had to look at the internal layout. A planning committee of key individuals, including the manufacturing director, production manager, senior production engineer and quality manager, audited the manufacturing process for potential bottlenecks and improvements, process layout.
Instead of changing machinery, the team took an innovative holistic view that incremental gains throughout the process and, therefore, took the time to understand three key areas of the manufacturing process. Calling upon staff, of which 20 percent have 25+ years of manufacturing experience, to help identify bottlenecks, look
30 DECEMBER/JANUARY 2025 | ELECTRONICS FOR ENGINEERS
at streamlining processes and make the production pathway as linear as possible. In the audit, areas of the factory that had became integral to the realignment of the production lines.
Fortunately, these spaces were large enough to be dedicated to a complete cost centre, taking it away from the main assembly area and allowing for the eventual expansion of the assembly line to run as linearly as possible.
These spaces were big enough to allow external contractors to complete work without impacting or interrupting the production line. Eventually, once the job was complete, the team removed several walls to reveal the new workspaces in an use of the building.
The team implemented a schedule that worked around production, taking six to nine months from inception to completion with no impact on output.
The outcome of the factory space redesign production capability between two and three times what it was. The restructure has allowed the maintenance of OTIF in the coming years of growth and has already impacted the shortening of lead time from order placement to delivery.
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