Ventana Production Models

Ventana® Production Models focus on the technical and human factors affecting a manufacturing or service delivery process. They are used by managers to find the root cause of throughput and productivity limits, understand and accelerate production learning curves, and determine in advance the likely payoff of process improvement initiatives.

Examples
> Aircraft manufacturing
> Chemical testing

Aircraft manufacturing
For an aircraft manufacturer, Ventana modeled the production process to learn why manufacturing costs continued to climb despite significant investment to reduce them. Sorting out the massive volume of data and the complexity of the business, Ventana showed that the company's in-house econometric model for understanding the sources of operating problems was invalid, and that the company was vastly overestimating the impact of part shortages on their assembly operations while underestimating the effects of using inexperienced assembly labor. When the company addressed the real problem, the per-airplane assembly cost decreased by 45% in one year.

After realizing this immediate benefit, the company pursued Ventana's suggestion that redesigning the airplane to simplify assembly could significantly reduce both the assembly cost, and the sensitivity of assembly operations to labor experience. Over the long term, the company demonstrated the effectiveness of reducing part counts and simplifying assembly operations in each of twelve engineering and manufacturing projects, and the "design for assembly" initiative became the key contributor to the success of an important subsequent aircraft program.