The morning queue at 06:30, not 11:00.
High-volume plants live and die by the morning queue. A single missed EDI-856 on a tier-2 bearing race cascades into four idle stations by Thursday. A planned-order revision in SAP S/4HANA that does not reach the MES until the overnight batch costs a full shift of recovery the next day. Polymr keeps planned orders, inbound confirmations, cycle counts, and shop-floor consumption reconciled continuously.
Built for the high volume shape.
Polymr ingests tier-1 and tier-2 supplier EDI feeds (850 purchase orders, 856 ASNs, 810 invoices, 862 release schedules) into the MRP signal directly. A delayed ASN does not wait for the morning planner to discover it on a spreadsheet. The model writes the gross-requirement adjustment, the alternate source proposal, and the line-balance impact within the same five-minute window.
Takt-time station drift surfaces from the MES feed in real time. The 24% over-takt at S-04 zinc plate does not wait for the OEE report. Every signal (a station drift, an ASN slip, a quality hold) triggers a live line-balance recompute so the supervisor sees the new bottleneck the moment it moves rather than at the end of shift.
MRP master runs at 05:14. The planner reads the answer at 06:30.
The W23 master batch summary settles every morning. Each SKU resolves gross requirements, supply on-hand and in-flight, net need, and the recommended action. Five SKUs at risk this morning: PMR-4124 bearing race is the worst, with an 840-unit net deficit driven by the V-218 ASN slip. The alternate source line item is already drafted.
| SKU | Description | Gross req | Supply | Net need | Recommended |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PMR-4031 | brake hub assy | 1,980 | 1,820 | 160 | V-218 PO-84179 |
| PMR-4124 | bearing race | 5,800 | 4,960 | 840 | V-244 alt source |
| PMR-4406 | drive shaft | 720 | 720 | 0 | on plan |
| PMR-3811 | caliper assy | 8,920 | 8,920 | 0 | on plan |
| PMR-2218 | sub-assy housing | 2,240 | 1,920 | 320 | WO-1158 replan |
The bottleneck station is the one that bends the takt bar.
Line A runs a 38-second takt against PMR-4031. Five of six stations sit at or under target. S-04 zinc plate runs at 47 seconds, which is the 24% over-takt drag that pulls the line back from 100% throughput.
The chart reads station-by-station against the 50-second display ceiling. Target is the cream bar; actual cycle is the overlaid bar in purple (under-target) or amber (over-target). The dark line marks the takt target.
- S-01press in38s36s
- S-02CNC face38s41s
- S-03cross-drill38s39s
- S-04zinc plate38s47s
- S-05press seal38s35s
- S-06QC + label38s32s
Three lines, three balance states. Today.
Line balance reads against the takt target for each running line. Line A is the one under target; Line B and Line C are inside spec. The morning standup at 07:00 has the bottleneck waiting at the top of the queue.
Seven failure modes that take a takt-driven plant out at 09:00.
Each of these is what high-volume planners actually escalate on a Monday morning. PMR-* are internal placeholders, V-### are vendor codes.
- Tier-2 ASN slipA tier-2 supplier ships the EDI-856 nine days late and the line goes dark on Monday
V-218 acknowledges the EDI-850 on time, but the ASN never arrives. Receiving keeps the open PO marked "expected" against the planner queue. By the time the dock notices on Friday afternoon that PMR-4124 bearing races never landed, the W22 cut against WO-1124 has already been released to the floor. The brake-hub line idles at 09:14 Monday for the 38-second takt that needed 540 race halves on hand.
- Planned-order propagation lagA planned-order revision in SAP S/4HANA does not reach the MES until the overnight batch
A planner accepts a recovery suggestion at 15:40 and SAP transaction MD04 updates inside the minute. The shop-floor MES, however, only pulls a delta export at 23:30. Day shift the next morning works against a queue that is already wrong, and the second-shift lead has to re-sequence WO-1126 by hand against a printed pick list because the handhelds still show the old plan.
- Stale approval thresholdsA recovery PO sits overnight because the policy thresholds were set during the prior commodity cycle
The buyer drafts a recovery PO at 16:48 against alternate vendor V-244. The approval matrix routes anything over $42K to a director who reviews tomorrow morning. The threshold was set 21 months ago when copper was at a different price. The slip that started Friday at receiving is now a Monday-afternoon escalation instead of a Friday-evening fix.
- Cost-basis chain on substitute lotA substituted lot breaks the cost-basis chain and four weeks of margin look 4 points inflated
PMR-4406 seal rings are short, so the planner substitutes a higher-grade alternate from V-301 at a 14% unit-cost premium. The substitution is captured in the inventory move, but the standard-cost roll-up keeps the original $3.60 cost on the brake-hub assembly until quarter close re-runs the chain. Finance reports the wrong margin to the operations VP for four weeks running.
- Cycle-count discrepancy rippleA 12-unit discrepancy at WC-204 cascades into six recovery POs
A monthly cycle count at work-centre WC-204 reads 12 units short on PMR-4031-A hubs. MRP recomputes net requirements that night and surfaces six expedite suggestions across PMR-4031, PMR-4124, and PMR-4218. By the time the actual error (a miscounted tote) is discovered three days later, two of the six POs are already in flight to V-218 and V-301 at premium freight.
- Lying takt bufferAn 18-unit takt buffer becomes the assumed number that everyone plans against
The brake-hub line was originally specified with an 18-unit pre-station buffer to absorb 38-second takt variability. Over two years the actual sustained buffer has drifted to between 6 and 9 units, but the planning UI still shows 18 against forward demand. Every recovery scenario assumes a buffer that is no longer there, and the shop lead has stopped trusting the morning queue entirely.
- Trailing-4w supplier degradationSupplier scorecards rebuild quarterly and miss the trailing-four-week slide
V-218 OTD reads 96% on the Q1 scorecard. Over the last four weeks it has actually been 71% because of a die rebuild at their stamping cell. Sourcing has no view of the trend until the Q2 scorecard rolls forward in May, by which time the brake-hub line has burned three Sunday-night recovery cycles working around a vendor everyone still treats as reliable.
What this looked like at a two-plant tier-1 automotive supplier.
- Situation
- Two stamping-and-assembly plants ran a 38-second takt against forecasted weekly volumes. Daily planner output drove material releases, work-centre assignments, and overtime calls for both sites.
- What was breaking
- A single inbound resin slip on PMR-4031 cascaded into a 9-day backlog across four downstream WOs before anyone caught it. Planners burned the first two hours of every shift reconciling on-hand against MES-reported scrap before they trusted the morning queue.
- Demand → planning → purchasing
- Delay recovery
- Margin and bottleneck analysis
Where the operational shape is close enough to share playbook.
- Discrete manufacturing
Shares the revision-handoff fragility. when engineering posts a BOM change on a tier-2 supplied component, the blast radius on a takt-driven line is the same shape as on a discrete shop, just at five times the unit count.
- Industrial / multi-site
Multi-plant high-volume operations need the same morning-queue discipline aggregated across sites, with a central operations roll-up and per-plant planner queues that stay autonomous.
- Make-to-order
Engineered substitutions and one-off recovery routes from the MTO playbook feed directly into how a high-volume line handles a degraded tier-2 lane without dropping takt.