Happy Cows
Your cows are having a bad day. You can’t just fire them. They don’t respond to bonus payments. How are you going to satisfy your customers?
Cows are cows and they produce what they produce. You can give them better food or nicer living conditions. You can play music for them. You can rub their ears. But, ultimately, the amount of milk they produce on a given day is up to them, not to you. When they have a bad day, they may produce less milk. Let’s face it – Mother Nature will never win a Supplier of the Year award.
Meanwhile, you have standing orders with your customers. The kids at the school need their milk. The chefs at the restaurant need their cream. If your supply is unpredictable, how do you take care of your customers?
This is precisely why we developed the Lawson M3 Yield Optimizer. The cows give so much milk and the milk has certain measurable characteristics (butter fat, cream, etc.). You have orders for products that require so much milk with such and such characteristics. What if the yield and the orders don’t match? The Yield Optimizer analyzes what you have and what your customers want. It then calculates the best way to use the yield on hand.
You can define “best way” in several different ways. You may want to satisfy as many different customers as possible. Or you may say the kids come first, so fill all orders from schools and then figure out what else we can do. Or you may want to identify which products to create in order to maximize profits. You tell the Yield Optimizer what your goals are – it tells you how you might achieve them.
Yield Optimizer is useful in any process manufacturing industry, not just dairy. We also have a Stock Build Optimizer for companies that manufacture-to-stock. Either way, you can optimally balance what you have with what your customers want. Any other way could lead to udder failure.
As its name implies, The Lawson Opinionizer offers opinions. We believe we've got our facts straight but we don't guarantee it. A new Opinionizer appears every Monday. If you have an opinion, send an e-mail to Opinionizer@lawson.com
|