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Showing posts with the label Inventory

The Ticket That Saw the Outage Coming

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The morning the system went down, the plant did everything right. The named person called manual mode, the binder came off the shelf, the paper logs started flowing, and by the end of the day the system was whole again. The plan worked. But here is the part nobody talks about: the outage did not arrive unannounced. It had been knocking for three days. On Tuesday, one operator could not log in. On Wednesday, two more reported the same thing, and a supervisor said the screens were slow. On Thursday, a scanner timed out at receiving, a label printer failed at shipping, and somebody filed a ticket that just said "Plex is slow." Each ticket was small. Each one got a P3 and a workaround. Nobody connected them, because nobody was looking at the queue as a whole. Your ticket queue is not just a list of problems to fix. It is the only sensor you have that watches the system all day, every day, from every workstation in the plant. Triaged one ticket at a time, it tells you what...
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Your Tool Crib Is Telling You Something: Cycle Counts as an Early Warning

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A year ago, I wrote about setting up cycle counting for supply items in the Plex ERP tool crib . We covered why counting a little throughout the year works better than doing one large annual count, how to set up counts in Plex, and the basics of ABC classification and assigning ownership. That post focused on how to count . This one is about what the count results can teach you. Listen to this post When the Counts Start Drifting You set up the cycle types, define the parameters, and get Plex Mobile scanning. Counts happen on schedule—and then the same variances keep appearing. A few carbide inserts are short. A drill index is over. The differences aren’t huge, but they keep coming back. The first instinct may be to count more often. But if the same items repeatedly drift in the same direction, counting more frequently probably won’t fix the cau...
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