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Introduction to OTTO
OTTO is an early warning system for potential order delays that helps plant personnel pull material through the plant ensuring on-time shipments. It provides a true link between customer demand (internal and external) and both manufacturing & purchasing activities. OTTO recognizes and notifies plant personnel in advance of potential delays thereby helping prevent materials shortages, production delays or both. It integrates seamlessly into existing ERP software but doesn't modify the system or interfere with its normal operation in any way. OTTO has proved most beneficial to companies that need to either maintain or improve customer delivery performance. Some of the challenges OTTO helps overcome are:
— Too many production disruptions. — Too many missed or changed shipment dates. The symptoms for companies that already have a high delivery performance are more subtle. Performance level is frequently maintained by largely unrecognized but almost herculean efforts by materials and production people on a daily basis in an emergency-room type atmosphere. Materials management planning systems were supposed to eliminate these problems, so what happened? Maybe they were eliminated for a time but have resurfaced because the pace of business is accelerating and time has become the critical issue! Manufacturers today are under constant pressure to reduce delivery lead-times and the result for too many manufacturers has been an increase in both shortages & expediting and a tremendous increase in pressure on manufacturing operations in general and material management in particular.
Planners, schedulers and buyers spend significant time attempting to realign dependent priorities while users are trying to execute the plan and it requires shuffling lots of paper (and screens) chasing demand relationships. This results in a lot of "blind" expediting, hoping to ship on time, and wasted resources working on the "wrong" things. Users are continually "surprised" by late deliveries and late completions. They're drowning in data but starved for information! In short, people are working with tools that are inadequate for the current reality.
OTTO sorts through the planning data — all demands and "orders" — and tags each activity to its source demand. It provides useful reports and on-screen inquiries highlighting actions that will impact near-term customer shipment success. Production, material and purchasing managers will spend their time taking action and getting results — not shuffling paper and working through "pegging" screens. The question: "What's the status of this customer's order?" can be answered in minutes — with confidence! The focus of planners, schedulers and buyers will be on those activities that make a difference. The result is critical activities are identified before they cause a delay and action can be taken to prevent the delay. OTTO increases the productivity of knowledge workers such as planners, schedulers and buyers. Information systems are really a mechanism to facilitate communication throughout a manufacturing company. The system supports organizational structure, which defines responsibilities by department. As tasks are completed the system is updated and responsibility is passed to another person or department. The communication mechanism begins to breakdown when lead-times are shortened for two reasons:
Think of the race as the manufacturing process and the baton as responsibility being transferred from department to department. OTTO removes the informational obstacles preventing material from flowing through the plant.
OTTO has been on the market for about eight years and our customers range from high-volume quick response to complex capital equipment manufacturers. Until recently, Systems Plus worked one-on-one with each customer to perfect their OTTO product and ensure it was easy to use, solid and reliable. We're now making a completely packaged, self-installable product available for a reasonable price to the entire community of packaged MRP/ERP software users. We offer a Free Trial using your live data. OTTO self-installs in under an hour. No, it doesn't. OTTO only "extracts" data from the ERP database to create a data warehouse. It doesn't change your existing ERP system in any way nor interfere with its normal operation. OTTO is also not affected by updates to your ERP system — unless there's a change to the database structure of the files it accesses.
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Planning is item-based. All demands are treated alike; they're summed by item and thus "hidden" by the order planning logic. Answering status questions requires pegging by level and date, which can be difficult, confusing and time-consuming, so it's tough to determine which recommended actions are important for near-term shipment success.
In a 4-mile relay the only thing that matters is speed. The passing of the baton is unimportant as any loss of time from a bad pass can be made-up with speed. However, in the 440 relay the thing that really matters is the effectiveness of the baton pass as the race doesn't last long enough to allow lost time from a bad pass to be made-up.