Smart Operations Cost Reduction

In addition to strategic issues such as sustainability efforts, labor shortages and supply chain problems, manufacturing companies, especially outside the growth sectors of high wage-markets, are suddenly facing increasing cost pressure due to declining order intake. This structural shift is new to many managers in the industry - after all, we can look back on almost 15 years of uninterrupted economic growth.

But how can you go about reducing your costs in the short to medium term? Fortunately, new times also bring new opportunities: through digitalization and data analytics, you now have the opportunity to identify and exploit cost reduction potential both more quickly and precisely. Based on these principles, we've put together a package of four consulting approaches that use our proven methods & tools to identify open potential in your operations and show a positive ROI within a few months, without any further investment:

So regardless of whether you already have a clear picture of where you have cost potential or not: We offer you the opportunity to identify and/or monetize these potentials in the shortest possible time with data-based, focused methods. The methodical approaches are described in more detail via the download or down below.

DATA-BASED VALUE STREAM DOWNSIZING

When order intake falls, production capacities in shift models and multi-machine operation are often freed up. In order to reduce costs, it makes sense to eliminate these capacities. However, particularly in complex production environments with a large number of value streams and many shared resources, it is not trivial to identify and eliminate these overcapacities.
Therefore, we work with you and our team to build a data model based on ERP-, MES-, forecast- and/or PDA-data that enables the identification of precisely these potentials and supports you in achieving planning and control improvements as well as process efficiency increases. For this purpose, we analyze customer demand fluctuations, customer and production orders, lead times, batch sizes, pacemakers, backlogs, machine utilization, shift models and OEE with data from the last 6-24 months and a forecast for the next three years. Optionally, we also offer to simulate different demand scenarios and record corresponding adjustments per scenario to prepare you for all possibilities.

Investment: from € 25.000
Typical project duration: 2-4 months
Typical payback: 6-18 months

INVENTORY OPTIMIZATION

With increasingly broad product portfolios, planning the right amount of different raw materials and items is complex. However, precautionary overstocking now ties up expensive liquidity and results in storage costs of 9-18% of total inventory.
Together with you and your MRP department, we use our Inventory AnalytiX tool to analyze your ERP data to determine which inventories can be sensibly reduced based on consumption data, lot sizes and replenishment times. The proven benefit of this procedure lies in the knowledge of which inventories you can sensibly reduce in the short term on one hand, and the qualification of your disposition on the other. This way, no more excessive inventories are built up in the future.

Investment: from € 20.000
Typical project duration: 1-3 months
Typical payback: 2-12 months

Scrap cost reduction

Particularly when the causes of scrap are complex and multi-layered, classic methods from problem-solving technology often reach their limits, so that quality problems are not eliminated. Unnecessarily high costs for processes, material or rework are the result. Our approach supports you through systematic manufacturing analytics applications to identify and eliminate the reasons for quality problems in your production. To do this, we use data that you already have: ERP, MES or PDA systems, for example. This enables you to reduce material, machine and labor costs quickly and sustainably.

Investment: from € 15.000
Typical project duration: 1-3 months
Typical payback: 1-6 months

Cost reduction potential analysis

If you do not yet know where the cost reduction potentials in your production lie, how and in which order you can tackle them, our Cost reduction potential analysis helps you to systematically identify and document all potentials in order to eliminate them according to your roadmap. Together with you and your process owners, we analyze & identify all essential potentials in your production, logistics and business processes in less than a week. The focus is on the potentials that promise a break-even in less than one and a half years.

Investment: from 15.000 €
Typical project duration: 1-2 months
Typical payback: 4-18 months