Today’s challenge: there’s increasing complexity in your product line and increasing competition on the horizon. You need to drive out costs while driving up quality. And all the while, your customers are calling for greater customization and quicker delivery cycles. The keys to meeting these challenges are the Multiple Constraint Synchronization system and Holonic architectures from the µDA division of Holonyx.

What can Holonyx do for me? Holonyx offers a unique combination of manufacturing analysis and process improvement. Our services and decision analysis models will help you simplify your most difficult manufacturing issues. These models provide the framework you need to break complex manufacturing problems into easy-to-handle pieces. Our approach to strategic capacity modeling aligns your resources with your strategic objectives. Our breakthrough operations model lends certainty and predictability to shop-floor execution. This Multiple Constraint Synchronization (MCS) model helps you develop schedules that maximize throughput. Finally, Holonic architectures create processes for your business that improve execution and deliver flexibility and adaptability to meet customer needs.
What services does Holonyx offer? Our services include high-mix manufacturing education, corporate seminars, consulting, test strategy development and quality strategy development. We can show you how to effectively implement the MCS algorithm within your manufacturing environment. We’ll help you discover the power of holonics planning – in which independent autonomous entities come together in a cooperative fashion. Holonic planning provides the basis for making better, more competitive business decisions.		FAQ's >> What can MCS planning do for me?   >> How does MCS compare with Just-In-Time and demand flow?   >> What are the competitive differentiators for high-mix manufacturers?

The keys to competitiveness: MCS and Holonics

In the 1970's, just-in-time and demand flow strategies revolutionized the way repetitive, low-mix products are built. Today, Multiple Constraint Synchronization promises to do the same for non-repetitive, high-mix products. MCS is changing the rules by which high-mix products are manufactured. It overcomes the fundamental limitations of just-in-time and demand flow approaches for high-mix manufacturing.

MCS gives you a breakthrough strategy for scheduling resources and balancing workloads with multiple moving constraints. It can also be your path to reduced costs of inventory, improved product quality and on-time delivery. MCS can help you achieve greater flexibility in scheduling, make better use of your manufacturing capacity, lower your inventory requirements and, ultimately, be more responsive to your customers' needs and schedules.

With our Holonics architecture consulting, we assist organizations in creating high-performance processes and flexible business systems that will improve operational effectiveness. These architectures are applied to workflows, quality systems and communications infrastructures and create manufacturing environments that are adaptable and responsive to customer needs.

Frequently Asked Questions:

What can MCS planning do for me?
Multiple Constraint Synchronization planning helps you develop a tactical response strategy that meets customer demand within the required time horizon while maximizing throughput. The MCS schedule, executed through generic Kanban, minimizes work-in-process inventory. Ultimately, MCS helps you achieve superior profitability.

How does MCS compare with Just-In-Time and demand flow?
The just-in-time and demand flow strategies are ideal for manufacturing repetitive low-mix products. But they are inappropriate for non-repetitive high-mix products. This is particularly true in the context of sequencing and allocation decisions. It’s impossible to balance capacity in a non-repetitive high-mix environment – which is a fundamental just-in-time and demand flow requirement. Processing time, capacity constraint considerations, allocation and sequencing decisions are of paramount importance for reducing variability in high-mix environments.

What are the competitive differentiators for high-mix manufacturers?
In non-repetitive, high-mix environments, delivery and responsiveness performance are competitive differentiators. Cost and quality are order qualifiers. The opposite is true in repetitive, low-mix environments, where cost and quality are competitive differentiators. In low-mix environments, delivery and responsiveness performance are order qualifiers. The contrast between high-mix and low-mix manufacturing environments is significant when considering strategic goals based on these value propositions.