Production & Schedule Management

Managing the timeliness of manufacturing.

Production schedule management is a vital part of sourcing operation. It ensures the production has continual alignment with volatile market demand which has its peak and trough season. The demand volatility sets the challenges for the oversea production facility to achieve desired efficiency and synchronization. Therefore, it is crucial to create flexible production plans, improve resource utilization with detailed scheduling, and ultimately better meet market demand with timely, short production cycle time.

Production Capacity and Planning

The effective production planning with its given capacity to match forecasted demand is critical to the success of production management. We collaborate with local factories to carefully schedule and manage production to help ensure the most cost-effective and time-efficient delivery of products.

In today’s uncertain business climate, demand volatility requires consistent modification of production planning to avoid inventory shortage or redundancy, in order to capture busy seasonal demand and improve inventory cost efficiency. The most common benefits of this service can include:

Quickly fulfill production order with accurate, flexible production planning
Faster, more informed responsiveness with real-time on site decision making
Capacity utilization and resource allocation to improve efficiency
Effectively execute production plans with close collaboration along factories

Production Monitoring and Management

Our Production & Schedule Management Service also focus on production efficiency, contingency resolution, production process and operation supervision. It provides us the capabilities to monitor production, quality, and cost – and comply with increasingly complex production standards on the factory floor.

First, assessing the production risks and inefficiencies to identify opportunities for reducing costs and improve productivity and capacity usage.
Second, establishing contingency management controls and arranging alternatives to help mitigating risk of production breakdown and minimizing the supply chain disturbance.
Third, On-site personnels undertake production monitoring to prevent unauthorized subcontracting, sub-standard material usage, production cost overshooting.

Improving Production Cycle Time

When it comes to oversea procurement, lower production cycle time accelerate the supply chain movement to achieve great efficiency and better to accommodate volatile market demand and give companies the ability to implement more flexible competing strategies with short production cycle time.

Continental Solution adopts pro-active production management approach to deliver combination of flexibility and control of production process, allowing us to synchronize operations across all related operation within production process. We provide production report on field in near real-time to clients to gain the live insight of manufacturing status and progress.

Continental Solution utilizes production management to shorten the production cycle time by:

Providing up to date Key Performance Indicators to address problems before impacting production progress and containing costs
Integrating with our quality inspection program throughout the operations to maintain product quality, and process variability to ensure seamlessly delivery.
Enabling material synchronization from the suppliers to the production line and streamline the acquisition — production process
Standardizing manufacturing processes to ensure consistency, analyzing production statistics to review overall efficiency and provide production report to client in real-time.
Synchronizing the execution of post-production assessment, warehousing , logistics and documentation across manufacturing progression

Typical problems occur during manufacturing production

Manufacturers accept production order under circumstance that the factory is running at full or over capacity, which leads to the manufacturers may not able to complete the project on time or product quality can be compromised.

Solution: During supplier selection process, we examine the supplier’s production order for next 6 months, evaluate its manufacturing capacity and schedule to determine if it is going to be able to meet client’s proposed schedule.

Manufacturer subcontract part of production to others without the client’s knowledge in order to reduce cost, or avoid penalty for late delivery. It increase great risk in product quality and discrepancy in specification.

Solution: Unauthorized subcontracting activities pose risks to product quality and standard compliance. Our production management personnels randomly visit the factory to check production line without notice, in some case, our personnels reside at premise until the completion of project. Any subcontracting act without client’s permission will be considered as breaching of contract.

Suppliers intend to allocate more resource to production order of bigger volume and prioritize its order sequence, as consequence, some prior orders had been marginalized, and the production schedule was delayed.

Solution: We continuously obtain production updates from factory, and work together with factory to manage the production progress to ensure production is up to schedule. Late delivery will incur penalty charges under the contract terms.

Production can be disrupted due to unforeseeable circumstances, and to cause temporarily discontinuation of supplier’s production facility. Such as, labor dispute, flood and fire. It can significantly affect the supply chain normal operation and schedule management.

Solution: We enlist secondary suppliers with each project from our supplier networks, it is intended for unexpected circumstance that could interrupt ongoing production. We seek resolution promptly once disruption occurs, and allocate alternative manufacturer to continue the production and bring the cost of disruption to minimum.

With extended and stretched offshore supply chain, it is the common issue that long delivery cycle time has negative impact on efficiency of supply chain to meet rapid market demand and synchronize with organizational operation seamlessly.

Solution: We implement production & schedule management to lower the delivery cycle time substantially and incorporate with our logistics service to streamline the whole process to maximize the efficiency of supply chain operation. Affiliating delivery schedule with client's specific timing requirement and minimize the timing determent from distant offshore manufacturing base.