Jason Sciberras, President of our Saline, MI location, discusses the challenges in managing workflow on the manufacturing floor with the I-Connect007 Editorial Team. Here is an excerpt from the conversation. 

Johnson: Customers hand over specifications and design details to you and your team at Saline. How has your process of doing that job been changed by what we’ve dealt with for the past three years?

Sciberras: We’re so much busier. There’s so much more to do on it.

Johnson: Is it enough to just work harder or do you need to work smarter too?

Sciberras: It’s both. The evolution of our process over these last two years has been constant. I have an amazing team that I’m very proud of. It would have been very easy to get discouraged and say, “This is just too hard,” or, “What we’ve done should work.” We’ve had to evolve for sure. How we quote and when we quote is very different than what we used to do. Having good tools that allow us to see what those lead times look like and who’s got stock, we must know a lot more information up front and then find ways to actively attack the issues.

There’s more of them than ever. We’ve always had a process where a customer needs it in a certain time frame, but the lead times are a little bit longer than that. How do you attack the component constraints? When it was four or five items, that was fairly manageable. When it’s 25, 35, or 45 across every single customer, we’ve had to redevelop those processes to handle different volumes. Shifting, quoting, and purchasing have become one entity where they really work together to find the best ways to get the customer what they need, when they need it.

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Contact us HERE to connect with a team member at Saline, MI, or any of our facilities.