Farrell's Furniture Lean Plus | Client Stories

About Farrell.

Founded in 1961, Farrell’s Furniture designs and manufactures quality office and residential furniture to the highest standards. Working with only the highest quality materials, they design and supply customised furniture solutions, for commercial and residential, to organisations of all sizes in both public and private sectors.

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The Challenge.

One Example in production, it was becoming difficult (6-7 key production processes with numerous changes to the schedule) for the Teams to ensure they were working on the “right” work- orders to ensure final product could be assembled.
Often, some element of the process was falling behind, leaving increasing amount of WIP in the pre-assembly area – waiting for the last component to arrive.
As the volume increases and customers become demanding, this production scheduling complexity increases and the space in Pre-Assy gets jammed.

A Collaborative Solution.

Getting the buy-in and agreement from the Supervisors and Team Leads along the entire support chain – starting with Order Management, Despatch, Final Assembly, Pre-Assembly and production machining – on how we could use our existing systems to get “place of truth” for requirements /priorities and set internal SLA’s to help give guidance how to manage exceptions. (We needed to stay agile for our customers).
Designing and implementing specific production reports to help align the priorities in WIP – both from a customer requirement perspective and a WIP velocity perspective has made a huge difference to how the team manages the work.

Impact and Results.

This initiative is delivering improved Customer Order OTD to +95%.
It has accelerated the Flow of product through the production process …improvement of Av 2 days per process Labour revenue per employee KPI has grown by 10% through 2020.
It has “normalised” the complexities of scheduling…. Making for a less frustrated production team.
Key issues impacting orders flow are now easily spotted and action can be taken.