A manufacturing system which can improve customer response times radically while reducing tied-up capital has taken the US by storm over the past decade, but has yet to catch on in the UK. That could start to change soon for two reasons: first, companies that have implemented it here are starting to ask their suppliers to do the same; second, training has become more readily available. Demand flow technology (DFT) is a 'pull' system that relies on actual customer demand rather than forecasts to determine how many products should be made on a particular day. Each manufacturing cell gets its orders from the next cell in the production line, with the amount of time it has to carry out its work determined by a calculation based on the number of products that have to be made in the day. This means capital tends to be kept in raw materials rather than in more expensive finished or part-finished goods, in contrast to the just-in-time system popularised in the 1980s.
展开▼
