In most factories, capacity is not the problem — local efficiency is. One point in your plant decides how much the whole produces: the constraint.
We make the entire factory follow its pace, and deliveries become something you can promise.
Drum-Buffer-Rope and Buffer Management, proven in make-to-order and make-to-stock alike. Five moves, in order.
Long lead times and complaints often point to the wrong place. We map the full chain and ask the test question: if we add capacity here, does the output of the whole actually increase?
Drum-Buffer-Rope: the whole plant follows the bottleneck's rhythm, and product mix is chosen on throughput per constraint minute — not on unit cost or volume.
Most of lead time is waiting, not work — releasing orders earlier only lengthens every queue. Gated releases keep work-in-process low and internal lead time short and predictable.
Red-amber-green priorities everyone understands, on the shop floor and in purchasing. The buffer says what goes first — no more daily crisis meetings.
Every hole in the buffer gets a cause; the Pareto of causes points to the next improvement — one at a time, with focus. Improvement becomes a process, not a project.
Goldratt: force most resources to stand idle from time to time — or go bankrupt. Idle time at non-constraints is the buffer that keeps the constraint fed.
Promised due dates follow the order book and the constraint's capacity; shop-floor lead time follows WIP. Gate the floor first, then promise — not the other way around.
Acting on a resource that merely looks constrained wastes effort and can worsen flow. Map the full lead-time chain before naming the constraint.
When the constraint is loaded, rank products by throughput per minute of constraint time — and price or mix accordingly.
Long changeovers force big batches and big inventories. Improve the changeover and lot size follows — smaller lots, faster flow.
Where one material diverges into many products, the shared early resource is the usual constraint — and keeping it "efficiently" busy builds the wrong mix.
Constraints & Demand Synchronization — our decision-support system that makes the constraint visible at the moment of commitment, not after the fact. Integrates with your existing ERP.
Make-to-order, make-to-stock and hybrid models. Every customer request is checked against real capacity and inventory (available-to-promise) before you commit to a date.
Daily execution priorities for the shop floor and purchasing — the right protection for flow, without over-protection.
Queue monitoring and event tracking map the obstacles to flow; Pareto analysis points to the cause with the biggest impact on delivery performance.
Production environments we have synchronized — with C&DS running them every day.
C&DS production planning (MTO/MTS with ATP), Buffer Management for the shop floor and Dynamic Replenishment across three plants, integrated with their ERP. Result: –50% lead time and –30% finished-goods inventory — tangible within 8 months.
Read the TKF case →C&DS Buffer Management bringing the right focus to the shop floor and the purchasing department. From design to shop floor in 6 months.
Read the Deknudt Mirrors case →That's local efficiency at work. In a first working session we'll look for the one point in your factory that actually sets your output.
Book a working sessioninfo@leonard.eu.com · +32 3 448 06 15 · Kontich, Belgium