Episode Details

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 work. So we extracted that part of the software. We made it its own product offering called protected flow manufacturing that ties into any E R P system, whatever you're using today.

So what's nice about that is we can go into a company and help them in very short order. We're talking six to eight weeks and solving the late problem, right? Give them visibility and production of their true priorities of when and if the material is here or not to execute the prior.

And so everybody can see and know what they should be working on for future visibility. So that is when my customer will be able to get their order based on my capacity and material availability. 

Lisa Ryan: So what exactly is the late problem, and what is the extent of the problem you're seeing?

Mark Lilly: Sure. Many companies are struggling with this today, and very simply, it's not being able to get their orders out on time when they want to. I did a presentation at IMTS in Chicago last week, and I pulled together some macro data. In reality, there are over a trillion dollars in unfill fulfilled orders across American manufacturing in July. That was the latest statistics that came out of basically the fed. And that's about half of the entire manufacturing GDP. To put that into context, the manufacturing GDP is approximately just over 10% of the national GDP.

So there's a tremendous amount of opportunity. And I think anyone who works in a manufacturing company realizes an experience is this, whether it's for material or the supply chain issues we're having. Internationally, whether it's the workforce or not being able to find people, most companies are struggling because they would be able to ship if they had the capacity. If they had better management of what's happening in their production environment and better v