JARP Industries, located in Wassa, Wisconsin, is a wholly-owned designer, manufacturer, and remanufacturer of hydraulic cylinders. Since 1959, three generations of the Kraft family have served OEMs in a variety of markets. JARP has two facilities; the main plant, where the design and production of new cylinders happens, is about 125,000 square feet. In the last ten years, the company added a second facility, where they perform the remanufacturing of cylinders for major OEMs.
The Wisconsin cylinder maker has about 150 employees in a variety of positions across the two facilities, including welding, machining, and assembly. The company also has several engineers on staff. As a result, JARP can perform the end-to-end process of cylinder-making from design to production. The company prides itself on innovation, operational excellence, and customer intimacy. As a result, the competitive differentiator is the company’s ability to partner with customers as a one-stop-shop for all their equipment cylinders. Those needs often span 18-inch bores, to 20-foot-long cylinders, to small two-inch bore cylinders, and much more. As you might imagine, JARP has an incredibly high product mix – they consider themselves a high-variety, high-volume manufacturer.
The product mix creates a lot of complexities when it comes to moving products through the manufacturing process. Despite the JARP’s readiness to customize, it’s also their biggest operational challenge. Every order is unique and that creates a lot of variety on the shop floor – including a high mix of labor resources, machining resources, and welding resources.
The company's CEO admits that the company’s daily routine is neither easy nor predictable. Synchronizing all the components required to make everything from start to finish, plus all the labor resources needed for assembly at the right time is a colossal endeavor. Getting everything done in the right order, at the right time, in the correct quantities, with on-time delivery – the complexity of all that is the greatest hurdle the company faces every single day.
But JARP understood that on-time delivery wasn’t just biggest challenge – it was also their greatest opportunity.
The company and its entire team had been applying lean manufacturing techniques for some time, to make processes more efficient. There came a moment when the company was growing rapidly, and product mix was shifting. Despite the exciting growth and changes, even their very best people couldn’t apply the same old strategies to optimize production equipment, labor resources, and materials to make on-time delivery happen every single time. Furthermore, the team had difficulty finding more capacity to accommodate sales and orders growth. Worst of all, most of the team – planners, engineers, and shop floor teams alike – was burned out and results were suffering.
Leadership wanted to find a solution, and fast. Lean, by itself, wasn’t helping the company hit on-time delivery targets given the higher volume of orders and product mix. It was time to find a production scheduling solution to handle complex constraints and optimize resources and materials.
JARP’s ERP vendor introduced company leaders to On Time Edge, a company respected for helping manufacturers overcome challenges that hamper on-time delivery to achieve manufacturing operations excellence. On Time Edge partnered with JARP to chart a course to improve operations performance. They did it by aligning people, processes, and technology – getting the right production scheduling application in place and showing the team how to consistently use it to their best advantage to solve scheduling optimization problems.
Within just a couple of months after project launch, the JARP team drove down order backlog by 35% and reduced overtime by 35%. During the same period, weekly sales numbers increased by 10%, but labor numbers held steady. The leadership team was amazed that they could hold labor numbers steady, when – in the past –they would have needed to bring on more people or increase hours to handle the explosive growth.
Today, the entire JARP team feels equipped and empowered to continue driving sustainable business results through operations excellence. Their culture and processes are in place, and the company is applying technology to continue getting good results. Company leadership acknowledges that the business will continue to change and new challenges will come up. They feel confident that their partnership with On Time Edge will enable the company to address new opportunities. According to JARP CEO, “We know we can rely on them for coaching, a little support, helping us shape the strategy for how we want to use the system into the future.” The year following the initial project, JARP won a supplier of the year award from one of their top five customers, specifically because JARP had a perfect on-time delivery year. He went on to say, “I can honestly say that we wouldn’t have done that without On Time Edge’s help.”