May 2026 Newsletter - Knapp and Air Logic
- Andrea O'Dell
- 2 days ago
- 3 min read
On Location at KAL
Employee Empowerment Program
What an impressive start! We are listening to all your wonderful ideas!
7 cards have been closed since the start of the Employee Empowerment Program!
What does this mean? Employees came up with ideas and they were heard and addressed!
Improvement have been reviewed and completed!
How does this help KAL? Through our solid stepping stones:
Safety, Quality, Inventory, and Delivery
What can you submit? Do you have an idea of how a job is done, an ergonomic/safety concern, or what will make your workplace a better place?
From the President’s desk… This is the President’s Corner
Hello Team,
As a follow-up to last week’s business update meeting regarding Kanban and material availability concerns in our plant, I was approached with additional questions after the meeting. I wanted to clarify some near-term actions we are working on to determine next steps for our planning and material replenishment strategies.
As mentioned, no additional materials will be put on Kanban while we are re-evaluating the program.
We acknowledge that prior to the start of the month, there is a disconnect between the expected number of work order hours in GS as compared to the actual standard hours required to support the sales plan. Planning is working towards identifying the reason for this gap.
We are in the process of verifying a reorder point analysis report in Global Shop that offers some additional planning benefits
Two different settings for service factor (set inventory level depending on a higher or lower chance of a future stockout)
Looks at the last 12 months of consumption in monthly buckets to help better understand the peaks and valleys
Allows for a quick simulation for varying lead time based on the number of set-ups we would want to incur in molding
Due to the number of purchased items that are being routed through inspection, we are in the process of adding some queue time to the part replenishment lead time to account for the additional time it takes for purchased materials to clear QC.
To better account for some of the current constraints in Molding, we are looking for additional ways to improve our material availability due dates during the initial sales order acknowledgment process, so we can minimize expediting within the plant.
Thank you for your continued patience and support, and please keep bringing up any opportunities you see to improve our materials program.
-John
6S Journey continued update>>>
Sustain: The final S -support, maintain, and keep it going! Several areas are living in the sustain portion of 6S and KAL can tell!
The month of April shifted trophy holders to our Shipping Department.
April 30th, Laura and I hosted J-Fill for a pizza lunch to celebrate their 3-month trophy reign!
You too can win a free lunch with the CI team by receiving the trophy for 6S sustain for 3 months in a row!
J-Fill, keep up the good work, there is opportunity to steal the trophy back!
GLOBAL SHOP CONFERENCE
On May 7th Liivika and I went to a Global Shop (GS) Conference to learn more about GS Capabilities and how we can utilize the system to help us work smarter not harder.
Some the Takeaways Were:
GENII - AI Capabilities
Mobile Applications
Dashboards to create better visibility to WC Performance / Part Tracking / Advance Planning/ Inventory/Sales
Customizing GS screens to make them more user friendly to how a user would like to see data
Creation of New Screens vs Old Screens; one example Supply and Demand- and the changes to how the new screen is set up
New ARCs to extract more data and provide better sharing opportunities among departments
What we realized is the opportunity for all of us to take advantage of what GS has to offer. We are excited about the possibility to try new modules to help improve the flow of information to the entire plant. If you are interested in learning more, please reach out to Liivika or I.
As we launch new GS modules, we will keep you posted on what is available and how to use.
-Thank you, Laura Hanna
Final Thoughts...
Call to Action
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