QRM Introduction Fundamentals of Quick Response Manufacturing

Reducing lead times ensures satisfied customers, is good for business, and provides an enterprise-wide management strategy to improve your company's competitiveness. Learn how a unified focus on reducing lead times can eliminate waste, reduce costs, and improve quality in all areas of your enterprise.

Time is the most critical resource in today’s increasingly competitive global markets. Short product lead times will make customers stick with a company and ensure growing market share. Long lead times often result in extensive inventories, high WIP, unhappy customers, and, ultimately, falling competitiveness.

In this workshop, you will learn about the many hidden costs of long lead times and see how Quick Response Manufacturing tools and methods can eliminate these costs in all functional areas of your enterprise.

Key Learning Outcomes:

• Assess the lead time situation in your company
• Identify improvement opportunities
• Use your understanding of QRM principles to convince others of the need for change
• Start implementing an initial QRM project

This introductory course is ideal for professionals across all functional areas of an enterprise who are new to Quick Response Manufacturing (QRM) and want to gain an overview of its principles and applications. It is particularly valuable for managers, team leaders, and decision-makers in manufacturing, supply chain, purchasing, engineering, and office operations who want to reduce lead times and improve overall competitiveness. This introductory course will benefit anyone responsible for identifying inefficiencies, driving process improvements, or initiating organizational change.

The Power of Time

• The many hidden costs of long lead times and the power of short lead times
• Pitfalls of traditional methods and how QRM provides a new approach to lead time reduction
• Evaluating your organization(s) through short QRM quiz
• Group workshop on waste due to long lead times

QRM and Organization Structure

• The Response Time Spiral and ways to eliminate
• QRM’s cellular structure and how it works
• Case studies on cell implementation

Understand and Exploit System Dynamics

• Rethinking traditional efficiency and utilization measures
• Strategies for developing effective lot sizes
• Capacity planning: key relationships between utilization and lead time
• Accounting strategies

QRM – an Enterprise-wide, Unified Strategy

• How QRM extends beyond the shop floor
• QRM solutions for material planning, shop floor control (POLCA), supply chain management, office operations
• Mindeset and performance measures

"Good overview of QRM and a new way to think about the product delivery process."
—Mark Shepherd, Manufacturing Cell Supervisor, Graco, Minneapolis, Minnesota

"It was very interesting. Much better than most seminars I’ve attended. Professor Krishnamurthy was very interesting and entertaining with excellent real world examples."
—Bob Haugen, Vice President of Manufacturing, Waymar Industries, Burnsville, Minnesota