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Indiana Mills & Manufacturing Says Lean Leads to Growth and Agility

A lean philosophy combined with extensive use of Oracle E-Business Suite's integrated applications helped IMMI (formerly known as Indiana Mills & Manufacturing, Inc.) grow its business by about 40 percent in the last four years without forcing additions to warehousing and other manufacturing support staff.

The Westfield, Ind., manufacturer of seat belts, child and infant safety restraints, and commercial vehicle safety technology, also credits lean manufacturing with increasing its responsiveness to the ever-changing demands of its customers.

"Much of that efficiency is the result of the scalable systems we implemented based on Oracle functionality and on the lean concepts that we'd come with," says Ken Rice, manufacturing engineering manager.

"We serve some markets that go through dynamic changes in business levels where demand shifts up and down rather quickly," he adds. "We're fortunate that our business lines are diverse and they don't all cycle together. So our real issue is how do we move people around and keep from having to hire additional people to make the best out of our peaks and valleys in different markets."

Key technologies to facilitate IMMI's lean efforts include Oracle Release Management, which processes electronic planning and shipping schedules from customers, Oracle Manufacturing's Assembly-to-Order (ATO), and Oracle Flow Manufacturing, which allows IMMI to move additional departments to lean manufacturing without having to increase its staff of manufacturing engineers.

The ability to respond to customer requests for expedited orders "is fairly easy now because of the way the system is designed," Rice says. "In the past somebody would have had to handhold the expedited order through the process to make sure that it could get through on time. It was a very difficult process, and it would have cost a lot of other delays of other products at the same time."

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