Laurie Dana Success Stories

Success stories written by Laurie Dana

Success stories build credibility for a product or service because they are from the customer's point of view. They are especially useful in B2B marketing to prove return on investment. Success stories also provide content for magazine and newspaper articles, newsletters, the company website, press releases, social media, and annual reports.

Fourth Shift — Silent Knight

Fourth Shift — Orthologic

Finding Success with Fourth Shift

Silent Knight

Greater inventory control allows Silent Knight to focus on quality and meeting customer demand

Silent Knight had an inventory management problem

“Our inventory was growing out of control,” recalled Steve Janson, the company's controller. “We had purchased another manufacturing resource planning (MRP) system less than two years before installing Fourth Shift software, but it wasn’t doing what had been promised. Our inventory levels were too high, and our Purchasing Department had no trust in the system."

"The system claimed multiple planning parameters, but none of them really worked,” added Craig Swandal, manufacturing manager at Silent Knight. “We also had difficulties exporting data from the system. We would extract data, and it wouldn’t match up with what was in the database. Because we couldn’t trust our data, we were overbuying just to make sure we didn’t have production shortages.”

Within a year of implementing Fourth Shift software, Silent Knight reduced inventory stock levels by more than $1 million dollars, while increasing revenues 22%. The company also improved annual inventory turns from 3.5 to 6.5, reduced manufacturing cycle time from 40 hours to 32 hours, and improved standard order lead-time from two days to one day.

Silent Knight realized the only way to get asset management under control was to dump the old system and get a new one.

“We ran the numbers for what we thought we could do with improved purchasing and inventory management. We believed improvements in those areas would pay for the system,” said Swandal.

Silent Knight looked at a variety of MRP systems before deciding on Fourth Shift. “After our evaluation process, we believed Fourth Shift offered the strongest inventory, bill of material, and shop floor management software,” said Janson.

The Fourth Shift Solution

Fourth Shift enables Silent Knight to keep finished goods in inventory while at the same time minimizing inventory levels. “Fourth Shift gives us good visibility into our inventory issues,” said Swandal. “It gives us the flexibility to use different planning parameters based on the situation.”

“We can take all our high-risk, high-dollar parts and plan them in a unique fashion, and leave everything else for another planning capacity,” continued Swandal. “Fourth Shift’s master scheduling capabilities, with multiple planning parameters, is one of the system’s strengths, and a reason we’ve been able to realize a huge inventory reduction.”

Fourth Shift’s export capabilities also helped Silent Knight analyze its business needs and control inventory. “It is very easy to access data and put it into any format you want,” said Swandal. “Our staff can routinely extract data into their own Access database and create reports. We can look at whatever data we want, and we can believe the data.”

Jason agrees that inventory reduction and data integrity are important benefits of the system. “We’ve taken one million dollars out of inventory, and at the same time increased revenues 22%. We improved our customer fill rate with less inventory. Correlating with that, we now have users buying into the system and trusting the results. That’s something we didn’t have with our old system.”

Silent Knight currently has 2,000 active inventory part numbers, which are managed by a virtual kanban system made possible by Fourth Shift’s ability to interface with third-party applications. Silent Knight created the virtual kanban system using Microsoft Access and Fourth Shift’s MRP and barcode data collection applications. The kanban system is organized in Access so that everything is in a cell on the floor where products are built. The Access database contains the minimum and reorder quantities for each part number within a cell. As material is backflushed out of the cell, the system automatically prints a reorder report that lists part numbers, quantities, and barcodes with that information. The stockroom takes that information, picks the part, and uses the barcode system to make purchasing and inventory transactions.

“Virtual kanban is a huge timesaver,” said Swandal. “Each cell order report is generated daily and contains up to 35 parts per cell. We have 13 cells, so that’s a lot of part numbers for a chance of data entry errors if we relied on manual data entry. With our kanban system, all a person has to do is scan the barcodes and the inventory and purchasing transactions happen automatically. All 35 parts are in the system within a minute. This eliminates the possibility for entering the wrong qualities and part numbers.”

Fourth Shift enabled Silent Knight to grow its business without adding personnel. “Before we implemented the Fourth Shift MRP system, we thought we needed to add purchasing and inventory control staff. However, we’ve been able to grow our business and give our staff more time to do their jobs better, without hiring additional staff,” said Janson.

Bottom Line

Within a year after implementing Fourth Shift MRP software, Silent Knight was able to reduce inventory stock levels by more than $1 million dollars, while increasing revenues 22%. The company also improved annual inventory turns from 3.5 to 6.5, reduced manufacturing cycle time from 40 hours to 32 hours, and improved customer order lead-time from two days to one day.

“We were able to achieve manufacturing excellence because the Fourth Shift system gives us full control over our production process,” said Swandal. “Our expedite list for past shortages used to be several pages long, and that was when we were carrying over a million more dollars in inventory than we do today. Today, we typically have one or two items on our expedite list at any given time. The confidence we have that we can produce what we say we’re going to produce takes all of the inventory issues out of the equation. It lets us concentrate on our core business needs, which are quality control and cost reduction of materials and production processes,”

Silent Knight Company Profile

Silent Knight, LLC, designs and manufactures fire, communications monitoring, security, and access control products. The company developed the first digital fire communicator in 1985. Today, the company’s digital communicators are used in over 150,000 fire systems worldwide, including those of other major suppliers.

Based in Maple Grove, Minnesota, the company has one of the shortest product development cycles and delivery rates in its industry. “We manufacture OEM products for competitors, because they can’t get product to market in the same time we can,” said Steve Janson, Controller for Silent Knight.

top of page

Fourth Shift heals growing pains of orthopedic device manufacturer

OrthoLogic is a leading developer of orthopedic devices that promote the healing of musculo-skeletal tissues. However, the company’s business processes were once far from advanced. OrthoLogic’s business system could hardly handle its rapidly growing manufacturing operations. All material requirements planning and forecasting were done on spreadsheets. The spreadsheet system made FDA reporting cumbersome. As a medical device manufacturer, OrthoLogic must meet stringent FDA requirements, which include lot tracking, vendor qualification, and reporting.

Orthologic improved on-time delivery from 70% to 90% and reduced manufacturing cycle times from 22 hours to five hours. The company also increased annual inventory turns from to two to six, reduced standard customer order lead-time from ten days to three days, and increased plant-level return on assets from 88% to 92%. These improvements were evident within the first six months after implanting Fourth Shift ERP software.

“We wanted a consolidated software system that provided manufacturing resource planning, and integrated manufacturing and financial information. The system had to be able to tie into our medical billing system as well,” said OrthoLogic Operations Manager, Brian Tower.

About the same time OrthoLogic began exploring enterprise software solutions, the manufacturer purchased a company that used Fourth Shift enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. “The company was very pleased with the Fourth Shift system. They gave us high expectations for the software and we believed it would be an excellent tool for us.”

The Fourth Shift Solution

Fourth Shift provides us more accurate control of our orders and vendor lead times,” said Tower. “We now know when to schedule production and when to order materials.”

Orthologic also finds it easier to comply with FDA reporting requirements. “We no longer have to provide reams and reams of spreadsheet notes. The system reports where inventory is and what lot traces have moved.”

With controls built into the system to ensure data integrity, Fourth Shift software supports FDA compliance and other initiatives in several ways. The system allows OrthoLogic to track vendor quality and on-time deliveries in the purchasing module. It allows changes in bills of materials to be managed easily. Lots can be traced to the vendor and the end user.

In the near future, OrthoLogic plans to seek FDA validation for its business system, a time consuming process that includes procedure documentation. The Fourth Shift Online Help system will enable OrthoLogic to reduce the time it takes to complete the validation process.

Communication between facilities in Tempe, Arizona and Toronto, Canada is crucial to OrthoLogic’s ability to manage manufacturing efficiently. The Fourth Shift system allows the Toronto facility to access the ERP system in Tempe via the Internet. “The system gives the Toronto facility real-time snapshots of our inventory and materials requirements to provide us with the products we need faster,” said Tower. “We can also perform tasks remotely from our homes over the Internet.”

Bottom Line

Within a short time frame, OrthoLogic began to enjoy a return on its Fourth Shift software investment. The company improved on-time delivery from 70% to 90% and reduced manufacturing cycle times from 22 hours to five hours. The company also increased annual inventory turns from to two to six, reduced standard customer order lead-time from ten days to three days, and increased plant-level return on assets from 88% to 92%.

The company now runs more efficiently with stronger communication across the enterprise. FDA compliance is also easier.

Orthologic continues to expand without fear of outgrowing their system. “Fourth Shift is very flexible; we aren’t limited in any way by the system. Anytime we’ve wanted to do something different, the system has allowed us to do so. What’s more, we can use the system to monitor and predict our growth.”

Tower concludes, “Fourth Shift supports our needs as a medical device manufacturer by remaining current with trends and continuing to provide us with the functionality we need for our demanding industry.”

top of page