What Is a PFD, and How Is One Created?
A PFD is vital for employees in the manufacturing industry to understand because it helps identify business operational problems and helps identify the best overall ERP solution for your company. The most important thing to remember, though, is that a PFD is not a solution; it is a tool. Like any tool, its use requires setup and maintenance.
Once this tool is set up to address an organization's business goals, it can be one of the best starting points in your data gathering and assessment. There is a growing awareness that managing material flow is a key activity for manufacturing organizations. Controlling flow does impact inventory investment, obsolescence, cost of quality, and customer service through capacity/scheduling management. A PFD does not only help manufacturers clearly see the points for misallocation of material or capacity by showing the flow of material and documenting their related processes, but it also addresses the following areas:
- Quickly shows where there are bottlenecks in inventory
- Leads manufacturers to sources of product quality problems
- Helps employees determine which ERP and/or APS planning and scheduling solutions are best designed for your business' operating requirements
- Provides a benchmark of how a particular organization compares to, and differs from the standard manufacturing plant configurations.
Deciding which variables to measure and manage in a PFD is both interesting and challenging. During my first experience with it, I started with raw material and tried to work through the standard bill and routing. While I was at an engineering-oriented company, many of the routings were for costing, not for shop floor material movement, making it easy to get sidetracked with Boolean logic for staging and minimizing setups. Be careful; using your system's official routing for product flows may not provide an accurate model of the real world flows. But if you can confirm that your system accurately reflects all the staging, queue locations, and times of your inventory flow, then using the internal routing approach is acceptable.
I also learned that taking a top-down approach was much easier. In law enforcement, the police follow the money to find the criminals; in manufacturing, you should follow the material to identify your inefficiencies. When implementing the planning and execution portions of your ERP solution, you should model it based on your real-world material flow though the entire shop floor, from receiving to shipping.
Software and consulting firms like Green Beacon Solutions offer solutions to help manufacturing organizations determine how ERP solutions are effectively implemented for your business. By choosing to work with a trusted advisor that understands PFDs and how they map your organization, manufacturers will be able to define their business issues before designing or selecting an ERP solution. If successful, the impact on your business will be more on-time shipments, reductions in costly inventory, and overall improvements to plant utilization and efficiency.
