Fitts Industries Uses Spreadsheet Based Applications to Streamline Forecasting and Production Scheduling

Company Profile

Fitts Industries Inc. was established in 1947. The company’s primary business is producing wooden stair parts. The business is family owned and employs 100 people.

Situation

Fitts Industries manufactures a range of wooden stair parts that consists of around 2000 items including Rails, Treads, Newels, and Balusters of various specifications and designs. It runs two vertically integrated manufacturing units where all the activities from buying assorted-length green lumber to shipping finished parts are performed in-house. Since the complete process takes about six months and customers place orders at most two weeks in advance, the company needs to do a good job of forecasting its lumber requirements. Furthermore, the production process becomes more complex since limited resources, including raw material and machines, are available to meet estimated customer demand. Fitts has been aware of the importance of developing good forecasts and proper scheduling. Over the years, they have developed systems to deal with the above problems. These systems are simple and easy to use but they may not necessarily produce very good results.

Solution

Alabama Productivity Center was hired by Fitts Industries to help them design better systems that, to some extent, solve their problems and are user friendly. We were given the task of developing a forecasting and a scheduling system. In the first phase of the project, we automated the spreadsheet Fitts has been using over the years for scheduling. We created a database that listed all the item-IDs, their ripped lumber ID, number of components, thickness, length, etc. This advanced spreadsheet tool gave them a few advantages. One, the time required to schedule the next day’s jobs reduced drastically since now most of the parameters are in the database and the user just populates them from just one drop-down menu. Moreover, all the quantities including the number of setups are automatically computed which saves them a lot of time. Second, computations are accurate. The most important advantage of this spreadsheet tool was to help them prepare for an intelligent scheduling system that was developed after the spreadsheet-based tool. Currently we are in the final stages of the development of the rule-based intelligent scheduling system for the company. Development and implementation of the spreadsheet-based forecasting tool is also in progress.

Results

The spreadsheet tools that we have developed for Fitts Industries have helped them make improvements in various areas. They are using the forecasting tool for buying green lumber, loading kiln dryer, and planning for the purchased end-items. This tool has helped them in the following ways:
• moved the company towards lean/pull system
• reduced inventory of items that are not needed
• reduced number of delayed orders due to shortages in lumber
• proactive buying for demand
• reduced inventory of kiln-dried lumber
• reduced inventory of unsold purchased end-items
• reduced lost sales/backlogs due to availability of purchased end-items