Control system helps to shorten turnaround time, reduce work-in-progress
Consumers are getting more and more impatient. They expect turnaround times for their furniture to be almost immediate, according to Wayne Pickurel, plant manager at Hooker Furniture’s Martinsville, VA, plant. “The industry has had to find a way to ship product faster and faster,” he said. “It is being forced to shrink the time between the receiving of an order and the time that the product goes out the door.”
The manufacturing problem that shorter turnaround demands pose for manufacturers is that they have had to go to smaller cuttings because of the high cost involved with keeping large part inventories. Hooker recently addressed this problem with an investment in technology.
“To handle the smaller cuttings we have had to go to a control system for our production,” Pickurel said. “We now use a system called Go-Pro, which is a scheduling and tracking system.” The difference in this scheduling system and others, according to Pickurel, is the fact that instead of scheduling by case, as other systems will do, the Go-Pro System schedules by part.
“It puts the factory bills in the rough-end at a given date based on the number of operations to arrive at the cabinet room. If the part has fourteen operations, we put it in the rough end fifteen days before you need it in the cabinet room. If the part needs only seven operations, we put it in the rough end eight days before the operation. That system schedules every part based on the parameters that we give it. Rather than schedule a dresser, we schedule the parts in the dresser based on the number of operations needed for each of the dresser’s parts.”
Problem: Keeping up with the consumer’s demand for quicker product turnaround without increasing inventory.
Company Name: Hooker Furniture
Location: a total of five plants located in Martinsville, VA; Roanoke, VA; Pleasant Garden, NC; Kernersville, NC; and Maiden, NC
Number of Employees: 2,200
Gross Sales: $227 million
Product Line: casegoods, bedroom furniture, home office furniture, entertainment centers, casual furniture, and dining room tables |
Hooker installed the system late in 1999 and immediately had to start building databases. The company had to input all of its cutting operations before the system would be ready for operation. In February, once Hooker had built in all of the necessary data, it was ready to go live.
“The system has done several things for us,” Pickurel said. “It has helped us to produce furniture using smaller cuttings and has helped us to cut the work in progress. Right now our basic cutting is half the size it was when we started the system and we look to reduce that even further. This allows us to meet quicker shipping dates without having to keep so many parts in stock.”
The system is maintained by the employees out on the production floor. Instead of having checking stations out in the plant where machine operators have to carry their factory bill, this system has checking stations all within 50 feet of the operators. “That way all of the operations can check their own parts out,” Pickerul said. “At the station, the operator plugs in his clock number, then the part number and the number of parts completed. That helps the various supervisors in that the data is recorded in real time, so that at any time of any day he can pull up an operation and know exactly where that part is in production.”
Traditionally, the furniture industry has been criticized for being too slow to fill orders. Pickurel claims that because of consumer demand, that stigma is changing rapidly. “People like the auto industry where you can visit the dealership and drive away in your new car that very day,” he said. “There is an instant gratification involved with the consumer these days and it is spilling over into all industries. Consumers want more and they want it sooner.”
