Strategies to Fix the "Late Problem" in Manufacturing with Mark Lilly

Lisa Ryan: Hey, it's Lisa Ryan. Welcome to the Manufacturer's Network Podcast. I'm here today with mark Lilly. Mark is president and CEO of Lilly Works, and he helps manufacturers to solve the late problem. I'm going to let Mark explain a little bit more about that. In the meantime, Mark, welcome to the show. Mark Lilly: Thanks very much, Lisa. Appreciate you inviting me on.  Lisa Ryan: Please share a little about your background and what led you to work with manufacturers and create Lilly Works.  Mark Lilly: Sure. We've been doing this for a long time and referred to the team behind Lilly Works. It's a family endeavor. My dad started several manufacturing E R P systems, including one in the 1980s called Profit Key. Another called Visual Manufacturing in the nineties is currently owned by Inform. They're both designed for make-to-order high mix-manufacturing types of companies used by thousands of manufacturers. And they both also had very strong, traditional finite scheduling embedded in them. However, despite this great functionality in either of these products and what we've since learned, any E R P system has this traditional approach to scheduling and managing production that most manufacturers struggle with for several reasons. So a few years ago, the team got together in the 2014-15 timeframe, and we started a third manufacturing ERP system up in the cloud. And as we were designing it, recognizing that while that scheduling functionality was good and the previous folks struggled with it, we said, what can we do differently? We came up with an entirely different approach to managing production. So, from a material and a scheduling standpoint, we called this approach, or the software part protected flow manufacturing. The process is the dynamic production method. And we would go out into the marketplace and show folks the E R P liked this approach to managing production, but they didn't necessarily want to replace their E R P right now. So that's because that's so much w