CMC Electronics Scoop

August 16-2002

By Chris Lawler,
Director of Operations, Ottawa

CMC Electronics prides itself on the diligence and creativity of employees. Employee initiatives that challenge and improve existing practices fuel the continuous improvement of our overall business. A recent example of employee initiative is that of Daniel Lavigne, Program Material Controller, who works at CMC's Ottawa facility. Overwhelmed by the amount of manual tracking and use of spreadsheets required to manage the production requirements. Even with the existing tracking methods, Daniel felt he could only effectively control major projects, leaving a large number of production orders to take care of themselves. This, in Daniel's mind, was unacceptable, as he was determined to give all production orders the attention they deserve. By discussing his concerns with his manager, Mario Ricci, and other members of the Ottawa Operations team, Daniel devised a road map to improve the tracking of production orders.

Over the next few months, Daniel worked at home on his own time to develop a computerized tracking system. The system was named Bingo after an existing manual system of squares on a sheet of paper which visually represent the status of work on the production floor. Each square represents one unit of assembly. Daniel spent more than 500 hours developing a visual tracking system that reads data from BaaN and updates every hour to present an accurate status of all production orders loaded on the system. The software has been widely distributed recently throughout the Ottawa facility and is in daily use by many disciplines, including shop floor staff, supervisors, manufacturing managers and program managers. The use of the software assists in managing time much more efficiently. Weekly production and program meetings are now conducted using timely and accurate data in a format that is easily understood by all. It is anticipated that in the very near future, this software will be available company wide.

Roger Moniere, CMC Director of operations, Montreal, had been searching for this type of application for a number of years. "I wanted software that could manipulate BaaN and provide real time data at one place and be accessible to all." In September 2000, Roger submitted a request to five software consultant firms for a similar tool. Within industry, a tool of this type is often called APS (Advanced planning and Scheduling System). However, Roger was unsuccessful in locating a suitable tool at a reasonable cost. After seeing the tool developed by Daniel, Roger made the following comment. "I believe that the tool which Daniel created could revolutionize the way we want our processes to be monitored (SPC, ECO, NCR, Quality, Yields, Cycle time calculation, cost to complete, purchasing, etc....)."

CMC's Daniel Lavigne was congratulated recently by Jim Close and his senior staff on the solid merits of the computerized tracking system that he developed for CMC production orders.