A parts table with 30-plus columns, cut to 8. That is when in-plant logistics started to run

The table started with more than 30 columns. The business side’s feedback came down to three lines: hard to maintain, takes too long, too much work.

Once we cut it to 8, the in-plant logistics system finally ran.

The table is called a PFEP.

1. First, what a PFEP is

PFEP stands for Plan For Every Part. It comes from Making Materials Flow, published by the Lean Enterprise Institute in 2003.

Put simply, it is a table with one row per part, describing the part’s whole life:

• which storage area it sits in, which pallet it uses, how many go on one pallet
• how many one finished unit uses
• which workstation and which drop point it goes to, and how it gets there

Rick Harris, one of the book’s authors, puts it this way: “We view PFEP as the DNA of your plant.” LEI lays out a lean material-handling system in the same order: build the PFEP first, then a purchased-parts market, then delivery routes, and finally pull signals. The PFEP is step one.

2. Every delivery in an in-plant logistics system reads the PFEP

Our project’s planning document had one line: the PFEP table drives grouping, splitting, release, delivery and call-off of material orders.

When the in-plant logistics system receives a work order, it uses “how many per unit” to work out the quantity, “how many per pallet” to split it into pallets, and “workstation, drop point” to tell the AGV where to go.

So one wrong field means one concrete failure on the floor:

• pieces per pallet wrong: deliver too many and the lineside overflows; too few and the line calls again
• drop point wrong: the AGV arrives and there is no rack
• delivery mode wrong: a part that should be pulled at the station gets pushed by schedule

3. Why a 30-column PFEP could not be maintained

For comparison, LEI describes a typical PFEP with 17 categories, 7 of them about suppliers and transport (supplier name, city, state, order frequency, delivery frequency, carrier, transit time).

Ours had more than 30 columns. It packed the concerns of four groups (purchasing, warehousing, process engineering and delivery) into one table, then sent it to one group to fill in.

And it kept growing. The plan called for seven logistics modes: pull at the station, scheduled delivery, automatic empty-container return, automatic replenishment of standard parts, and more. Every new mode added a few more columns.

Worse, it goes stale. Move a workstation or change a design, and the table has to change too. The cut-over after an engineering change, which I wrote about earlier, also ends up in this table. For a while, several weekly plans carried the same line: “sync PFEP table with shop-floor workstations.”

4. Four ways to make a PFEP maintainable

1. Work back from the decisions the system has to make, and keep only the fields that drive delivery. We kept 8: part name, storage area, pallet type, pieces per pallet, quantity per unit, delivery workstation, drop point, delivery mode.

2. Name an owner for every column. Process engineering owns workstation and quantity per unit; logistics owns pallet, drop point and delivery mode; purchasing owns the supplier’s pack quantity.

3. One person enters data; changes go through a form. LEI’s view is that most companies set up one PFEP person, the only one who can make changes. When engineering, manufacturing, or storage and packaging people need a change, they submit a standard change request and that person approves it. In their case, everyone could see the PFEP, but only one person could enter data. For in-plant logistics I would add one rule: every workstation move or design change triggers a review of this table.

4. Give it a health check with arithmetic. Daily usage × days covered by each delivery + buffer = maximum inventory. Divide by the container quantity and you get how many containers you must have room for. LEI’s example: 2,000 pieces a day, each delivery covering 5 days of production, plus a 4,000-piece buffer, gives a maximum of 14,000; at 100 per container, the market must hold 140 containers. If the result doesn’t fit, a field in the table is wrong.

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I still can’t say for sure whether 8 fields are enough. When packaging changes or a workstation moves, which column is most likely to be missed?

At your plant, which column of that table is most often out of sync?