The overall goal is to optimize production with less down time related to instrumentation and piping components. At the same time, there are optimization benefits, creating direct impact at each department involved.
Optimization of Piping Components
The diversity and evolving product range of piping components often leads to several problems across procurement, design and production.
The benefits of our solution, in words by one of our customers
“Issues with small components often resulted in several weeks of delay in project lead time. Since our collaboration, these lead times have been significantly reduced, by as much as 65% of the project duration.”
Do you recognize one or several of these symptoms?
- Insufficient alignment between purchasing, design and production leading to time-consuming adjustment cycles.
- Customer specific components need to be produced, while standard components can be purchased. However, these different kinds of components require the same and optimal stock management.
- Use of different brands and types of components that are not ideally compatible, leading to production issues.
- Lacking uniformity in the components is causing issues in production.
- Wide variety of small suppliers, resulting in higher complexity for both design and purchasing.
- Suppliers focused on delivering product group(s), instead of enabling the best solution.
- Product rotations at your suppliers may lead to problems in production, due to changed technical product specifications.
Multiple stakeholders are typically impacted by inefficiencies and a higher TCO. Recognizing these common problems indicates that there is room for optimization.
- Purchasing must deal with a wide variety of vendors, with often different ranges and different technical specifications.
- Design Engineering is spending a lot of time adapting design to different components leading to multiple iterations cycles.
- Production is struggling to decrease lead time and avoid down time.
- Sourcing must find (urgent) ad-hoc solutions for both standard, less common, and project specific components.
- Administration has to follow up with the broad range of (small) suppliers, purchases and invoices.
Goals
Solution and Approach
We always start from our customer’s perspective and their end-goal(s). Our added value lies in optimizing the connection between design, sourcing and production.
Contrary to most suppliers, we do not start from our own catalog and our partnerships, which would restrict us from achieving optimal results for our client.
Our approach starts with analyzing current piping components, followed by mapping out the needs at project level. Typically, we look at 2 different components:
A. standard (trade) components
Purchasing primarily focuses on price and delivery reliability, while Design looks at technical requirements, and Production wants the right components at the right time to ensure smooth production.
We consider all aspects, from technical requirements to product availability and price levels. This allows us to create the ideal components mix, which is then implemented and underpins conformity throughout Design, Purchasing and Production.
B. customer specific components
Customer specific components require a different approach, whereby we use our technical knowledge and hands-on insights, to facilitate production.
We map the components used and analyze the opportunities for optimization, which are formulated into an ideal component mix from a production optimization perspective, including technical specifications and price level benchmarks.
Last-minute modifications, extended lead times, and variations in minor threaded components typically result in an average of about 20 issues per project, each of which could jeopardize production time.
Benefits
The overall Total Cost of Ownership is heavily impacted by the following benefits:
The need for daily ad-hoc emergency solutions is significantly reduced, by using the predefined ideal component mixes.
By no longer viewing each component as a separate part but rather as a combination of multiple components, Design and Production are simplified, and the likelihood of deviations decreases.
Production achieves faster turnaround time with less downtime through optimized availability. More qualitative processing of components is enabled by structured support and training.
These B-components no longer cause downtime during production and the total cost for this group of components could be reduced significantly.
More conformity across the stakeholders, enabled by a higher inventory predictability and clarity on the available alternatives for components used in production.
Benefits for each stakeholder
- Purchasing
- can apply a more simplified and uniform product selection, covering the full range.
- does not have to focus on the supplier capabilities but can work from the full requirements demand. This saves time and ensures more predictability and conformity.
- can reduce costs through economies of scale, centralization and optimized supply chain.
- Sourcing has to look less for ad-hoc solutions for both standard, less common, and project specific components.
- Production
- realizes reduced lead times, with less downtime.
- creates more qualitative solutions through structured support and training.
- Design Engineering can use a standard components library and can easily reduce the number of project specific, while achieving more uniformity in the designs.
- Optimized supply chain through project grouping and/or Kanban.
- Administration sees a reduction in the number of suppliers, purchases and invoices.