Demand Flow® Technology is a manufacturing process that uses just-in-time inventory, lean manufacturing, and six sigma efficiency standards to produce products based on customer demands. It requires employees to move from station to station as workflow demands and is geared towards product runs designed to fulfill current customer orders. The methodology reduces lead times by up to 90% and is best suited to mixed-model manufacturing and facilities that can quickly retool to make a variety of products.
Demand Flow® Technology (DFT) is a manufacturing process that incorporates many different streamlining and efficiency methods to produce products in the shortest time possible based on customer demands. This means that Demand Flow® technology uses concepts such as just-in-time inventory, lean manufacturing, and six sigma efficiency standards to maximize production quality and speed. The demand stream manufacturing process is unique, however, in that it modifies the typical assembly-line approach to labor used by most manufacturers. It does this by requiring employees to move from station to station as workflow demands in order to keep the production process running smoothly and at peak performance at all times. The other key aspect of Lean concepts that this type of flexible workforce most efficiently supports is that Demand Flow® technology is geared towards product runs designed specifically to fulfill current customer orders, instead of generating traditional batches for storage for the following question.
The basic concept behind Demand Flow® technology, pioneered by the DemandPoint company in the US state of Colorado, is that a manufacturing or business process is most profitable when a continuous flow of products is produced to meet specific customer needs. This requires the production process to be continuously modified on a daily basis to match incoming sales figures. Both controlling actual product production and avoiding intermittent idle workforce conditions are critical to the proper functioning of Demand Flow® technology. Such precise control requires scientific and mathematical models to manage the process. These models were originally created by John R. Costanza in 1984, an operations management leader who has since worked with several major US manufacturers in a variety of industries to implement the technology.
Lean manufacturing is a method of improving manufacturing processes that was developed in Japan and later incorporated into US companies and elsewhere as they lost their competitive edge over more efficiently produced Japanese products. One of the fundamental requirements for an effective and continuous flow of productive resources and sales-related work is that of rapid telecommunications. Previous versions of this Demand Flow® technology process were known as supply chain management, where the separate divisions of a company were all linked into a management network that attempted to precisely meet customer needs. The advent of the Internet and the proliferation of portable communications such as cell phones since 2011 have made it more practical to create a true just-in-time manufacturing process at multiple levels of a company’s hierarchy.
The Demand Flow® Technology methodology, however, has specific strengths and weaknesses. Because it is designed to be a system that can quickly adapt to changing customer inputs, it is best suited to what is known as mixed-model manufacturing and facilities that can quickly retool to make a variety of products. This makes these facilities more efficient in low-volume production runs of a wide variety of different products.
Companies oriented towards the production of a single main product in large volumes, in which every workstation is highly specialized, are less able to incorporate the principles of Demand Flow® Technology into their system. Workers cannot easily be cross-trained in highly specialized environments and the risk of accidents and production stoppages is high. Machinery that is also geared towards standardized high-volume production schedules cannot be easily scaled up and down in the volumes of output they generate.
Where Demand Flow® technology works, it is known to reduce lead times from receiving an order to delivery by up to 90% compared to traditional manufacturing methodology. The driving force behind the Japanese first perfecting such concepts, however, was the elimination of costs built into a manufacturing process that added no direct value to the final product. The side effects of such a small efficiency improvement, however, have led Japan to a dominant position in the global manufacturing market, and their ideas have been increasingly adopted and adapted by Western companies such as DemandPoint in the 20th and 21st centuries.
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