It's a Thanksgiving tradition.

Family members spend days pulling together the ingredients for the perfect Thanksgiving dinner. They spend hours stirring, basting, tasting, and watching the clock so that all the courses come out of the oven at just the right time.

Then the dinner bell sounds and the whole meal is wolfed down in about twenty minutes, just in time to kick back in a recliner and watch football.

At Berkline, the Morristown, Tenn., furniture maker, recliners are made to much the same rhythm as the Thanksgiving dinner ritual.

A complex preparation process culminates when all of the components are delivered to an assembly line in one of Berkline's three assembly plants. The prep work takes ten days. The actual assembly is done in less time than it takes to get from the Jell-O salad to the stuffing with gravy.

The secret to Berkline's success isn't a state-of-the-art manufacturing plant. "Our assembly lines are pretty basic," says David Hood, vice president of operations services. "Plastic totes, carts, and roller conveyor get the job done for us."

Instead, Berkline relies on up-to-the-minute information to drive time out of the process.

The key is a sophisticated manufacturing execution system (IBSS, www.ibss.net, 800-553-1038) that coordinates operations across a network of three plants where fabric is cut and sewn, three assembly plants where chairs are put together, and five warehouses. As a result, Berkline has reduced lead times from 4 weeks to 2 weeks.

"Our goal is to get the lead time down to just 1 week," says Hood.

Berkline is an integrated vertical manufacturer. While some subassemblies, like massage systems, are purchased on the outside, fabrics are cut and sewn in support plants, and reclining mechanisms are produced in Berkline's own stamping plant.

The assembly process isn't difficult. But given the number of options available to customers, it is complex.

While the traditional recliner accounts for about 30% of Berkline's business, the company offers 600 product styles, including sofas, love seats, sectionals, and formal recliners for the living room.

Those units can be equipped with options ranging from drop down tables, power massage and heat to powered recline mechanisms. Factor in leather, fabrics, colors, and patterns and there are more than 1.5 million possible product variations available to consumers. And, like the fashion industry, the options are constantly changing to create a new look each season.

If managing more than a million options isn't challenging enough, consider that most items are make-to-order rather than make-to-stock. Berkline assembles up to 5,000 pieces per day, and each is potentially a unique item.

For maximum flexibility, there is no concrete routing for products or fabrics. Any of the three assembly plants can produce any item in the product line.

"Our plant in Baldwin, Mississippi, might make a sofa today, and the Morristown plant will make the same sofa tomorrow," Hood says. "Our goal is to keep product moving through the plants by balancing capacity with outbound shipments."

That's the primary function of the manufacturing execution system (MES). The system integrates and synchronizes the activities across those facilities so that the components needed to make an individual recliner arrive at the assembly line just in time to be manufactured.

"The system does shop floor and finished goods tracking across the entire network," says Hood.

That integration provides real-time visibility into the progress of an order, which is crucial to meeting Berkline's customer service requirements.

That's because consumers are fickle. The customer who thought blue would be the perfect color ten days earlier may decide on green just as the chair is about to roll down the assembly line.

"With our old system, we batched information once a day," says Hood. "If a customer wanted to make a change in an order, we didn't always know when or where the order was in the process."

The new system tracks all the production steps from the time an order is scheduled for production until a delivery truck leaves the dock. The MES updates the ERP system every ten minutes, providing near real-time visibility across the system. That means a customer change may alter an order up until moments before the chair is assembled.

"If we're going to produce a unique product from scratch in two weeks, we need to know where everything is in the production pipeline in real time," says Hood. "Batching information nightly just won't cut it any more."

Berkline receives orders by electronic data interchange (EDI), fax, phone, and mail. With so many different options and fabrics from which to choose, all orders are reviewed by customer service before they are processed through the enterprise resource planning (ERP), even orders received electronically.

Production schedules are updated twice a week by a scheduling module in the ERP system. The scheduler assigns each order to one of 15 assembly lines in each of the three factories, according to capacity and the ultimate shipping destination. The ERP system then creates a bill of materials and schedules the production of components and fabric in an appropriate support factory.

Production information is passed to the MES to execute. The system acts like a traffic cop, updating the ERP as each step is completed.

While a recliner consists of a variety of components, chair parts like arms, backs, and reclining mechanisms are interchangeable. Once a piece of fabric is cut, however, it is unique. As a result, it's the fabric for an individual order that's tracked as it moves through the pre-assembly steps.

When a piece of fabric is removed from the cutting table, a bar code is created to link it to the serial number of a specific piece of furniture. The fabric is then placed in a plastic tote with its own bar code. The two are scanned, linking them for the MES system, which receives the information by radio frequency (RF).

Once the tote is filled in the cutting department, it is scanned at a shipping dock, and routed to the plant where it will be sewn and assembled. Following the sewing operation, the tote is scanned again and the information sent by RF to the MES. It then sends back which of the 15 assembly lines the fabric will be used, allowing the tote to be routed directly there.

"Our old system wasn't RF-enabled, so we couldn't track fabric between facilities," says Hood. "We had a pretty good idea when the fabric was cut, but we didn't know where it was if we had to find it."

Chair components and reclining mechanisms are also produced to order, and scheduled to arrive just-in-time for assembly. Components manufactured by outside vendors are stored in warehouses. The MES generates a pick list, and picking for those items begins at 3 PM the day before they're needed.

All of the items for an order are typically staged and scanned in wheeled carts 4 hours before assembly. If all the components are available, and there are no customer change requests, the recliner travels on roller conveyor between workstations and is assembled in stages.

Twenty minutes later, a finished recliner is scanned at the end of the assembly line. A belt conveyor transports finished goods to the shipping department, where another scan directs it to a staging bay to await shipping to a distribution center.

Once a truck is loaded, a final scan confirms that an order is complete. The system creates a manifest, a bill of lading, and an advance ship notice when required. Then it notifies the ERP system that the order has been shipped.

Building a recliner is still a hands-on process. The key, then, to reducing lead times isn't limited to improved productivity; it's reducing the amount of down time between steps. That is the edge Berkline has gained with the visibility provided by the MES.

"Our process bogs down when components aren't ready at the assembly line," says Hood. "We need visibility to know what's not on schedule so we can figure out how to get back on track."

In the future, Hood says, Berkline will continue to improve the MES to create more timely information and provide more visibility. For instance, Berkline is piloting a new Web-enabled order entry system for retailers who aren't large enough to implement an EDI system.

The manufacturer is also experimenting with several retail furniture exchanges that may also provide a means to communicate online with customers.

In the end, Hood explains, better information will lead to better decision making. That will reduce lead times further.

"The time it takes to manufacture a recliner is a fraction of the total lead time," Hood says. "If we can reduce the decision-making process to hours and minutes instead of days, we can reduce the amount of time components are sitting. That will improve throughputs."

With that, Hood might kick back in a recliner himself after Thanksgiving dinner and enjoy a football game.

1. Orders from retail customers are received by mail, phone, fax, and EDI and entered into the ERP system's order management system.
2. A factory scheduler creates a production schedule and bill of materials for upcoming orders twice a week.
3. Production schedules are passed from the ERP system to the MES system, which in turn synchronizes the activities in the support plants, warehouses, and assembly plants.
4. Orders are tracked via bar codes affixed to fabric and plastic totes in the support plants. The bar codes are scanned after each process is complete to update the system.
5. Manufactured components are picked in the warehouses at 3 PM the day before an order is assembled.
6. Fabric and components arrive four hours before assembly at a staging area. A final scan confirms that all items are present, and the recliner travels down the line.
7. Following assembly, recliners are scanned and directed to a shipping area, then scanned again to confirm the order is complete and has been shipped.

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