Production in the customer cycle” means controlling your own production in the same production rhythm in which the customer works: If 200 parts have to be delivered every day, 200 parts should be produced every day.
Production in customer cycles follows the idea of market-synchronized production and is seen as a key element of lean management. The aim behind this is to keep stocks low in the company’s own value chain and to ensure product quality thanks to the constant production rhythm.
Our tip: Real life doesn’t always work the way the textbook describes it! Our practical experience and empirical simulations show that, contrary to pure doctrine, in many cases production that is decoupled from the customer cycle can be significantly more economical! The decoupling of customer cycles makes it possible to produce in separate economic batch sizes, simplifies the production of different products for different customers (with different cycles) and makes smoothing and leveling easier. Production in the customer cycle is advantageous if production takes place on a customer/product-specific production line and product variants can be changed with little set-up effort.
Further information on this topic can be found here:
- Heijunka board
- JUST IN TIME (JIT)
