As manufacturing continues to become a commodity within the value chain, manufacturers are constantly challenged to create efficiencies to reduce product costs. This makes lean manufacturing more important than ever before – because lean manufacturing eliminates waste, minimizes process costs, and creates value that can be passed on to shareholders and customers alike.

The SAP Manufacturing solution supports a broad range of lean manufacturing techniques and processes that support the blend of push and pull methods most organizations employ to ensure timely production. These include flow manufacturing, lean planning and execution and data collection, integration, and analytics.

Support for flow manufacturing – Flow manufacturing consists of all techniques and processes for the management of production lines and the move toward single piece flow through the reduction of batch size.

• Line design
• Capacity line balancing
• Batch size optimization
• Takt calculation
• Demand management

Lean planning – Lean planning consists of all techniques and processes that set environmental parameters in preparation of consumption based replenishment (lean execution).

• Pacemaker planning and heijunka scheduling (including constrained anchored planning and optimization)
• Material pull or kanban planning: capacity assessment, trigger point and batch size optimization
• Safety stock and buffers planning. SAP Manufacturing supports standard (manual) and extended (system calculated) safety stock planning methods. With the extended method, the software automatically determines the appropriate levels using sophisticated algorithms that take service levels and materials replenishment lead times into consideration.
• Demand and collaborative planning throughout the supply-chain

Lean execution – Lean execution consists of all functions related to pull signal generation, signal distribution throughout the shop floor, and production/material movement tracking.

• Supports different techniques for pull signal creation: terminal, RF handheld, RFID devices, EDI, and XML messages
• Different flavors of kanban – pull – signal distribution: printing, EDI, mail, and so forth.
• Support for different replenishment flavors: internal supermarket- and pacemaker and heijunka scheduling/scheduling and external procurement including Web-based kanban
• RFID-enabled kanban
• Manual and automatic supply to production with container-independent summarized JIT-calls
• Operational method sheets
• Production tracking and back flushing

Manufacturing integration, information visibility, and analytics – Success in lean manufacturing is heavily dependent on quality data collection, integration, and analysis. Through MII – manufacturing integration and intelligence – and SAP BusinessObjects solutions, SAP delivers the integration, information visibility, alert based process monitoring, and analytical functionality you need to turn data into knowledge. Its powerful business intelligence solutions and data collection/integration functionality gives you the ability to capture and monitor data on a continuous basis and deliver it to the right person, at the right time and in the right format – all in real time.

Beyond lean techniques, SAP supports most manufacturing processes like high volume make-to-order manufacturing, repetitive manufacturing (order-less production), production order manufacturing, and assemble-to-order manufacturing.