Process Mining at Veco — Process Mining Camp 2017
Process Mining Camp is just one week away. All tickets are sold out by now and we look forward to welcoming all of you in Eindhoven very soon! If you were planning to come but have not registered yet, you can get on the waiting list here and we will let you know if a spot opens up.
To get ready for camp, we are releasing the videos from last year. If you have missed them before, you can still watch the videos of Remco Bunder and Jacco Vogelsang from Nederlandse Spoorwegen (Dutch Railways), Sebastiaan van Rijsbergen from Nationale Nederlanden, Wilco Brouwers and Dave Jansen from CZ, Gijs Jansen from Essent, and Roel Blankers and Wesley Wiertz from VGZ.
The final speaker at Process Mining Camp 2017 was Mick Langeberg from Veco. Veco is a precision metal manufacturer and Mick is a supply chain manager. With process mining, Mick found a technique to radically accelerate the New Product Development cycle and convert this to an opportunity for faster growth.
Veco had started using process mining three years ago as an addition to their Lean Six Sigma methodology, which helped them to reduce the lead time of production orders significantly. However, you often see that when you solve one problem, you uncover another.
As part of their growth strategy, Veco wanted to expand to new and existing customers outside of their existing part portfolio. When customers request a new product that they have not ordered before (so, it does not yet exist in the product catalogue), additional steps take place in the sales process: A sample first needs to be engineered, produced, and shipped to the customers before larger quantities are ordered.
To be able to close new deals quickly, Veco has the ambition to produce and deliver these samples within 15 days. However, by extracting data from the CRM and ERP system and analyzing it with process mining, they saw that it in fact took on average 52 days to deliver the samples to the customers. The longer the sample production process takes, the higher the risk that they may be losing these orders to the competition.
To understand the root cause of the delays, Mick and his team identified a new process ‘From Engineering to Order’ that was not managed before. In contrast to the production process of their regular catalogue parts, these sample parts required the involvement of the engineering department before they could be produced.
By involving members from both engineering and production, a “fast lane” was created for the engineering and production of these samples to speed up the ‘Engineering to Order’ process. By experimenting with this new process for a few weeks they were able to get “jaw-dropping” results. Within weeks, the director gave them the green light to implement this new way of working as the standard process, paving the way for future growth.
Do you want to learn more about how Veco discovered and improved their New Product Development process? Watch Mick’s talk now!
If you can’t attend Process Mining Camp this year, you should sign up for the Camp mailing list to receive the presentations and video recordings afterwards.
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