EPP Integration
Engineering, procurement and production subordinated to one master, the production beat.
Engineering, procurement and production are conventionally three departments, each serving its own master. EPP Integration gives them one: the production beat set by TACT. Design becomes timely and production-friendly; procurement stages material to the beat; production becomes the customer the upstream functions exist to serve.
The integration is asymmetric and bidirectional. The engineering question changes from “what is the optimal design?” to “what can production build at the TACT?”, and each function hears back what its work produced downstream. The working rule is timeliness over precision: a less-refined drawing shared when it is needed keeps the flow alive; a perfect one delivered late breaks it.
Its framework runs through four layers: total optimum, on-time information exchange, perfect preparation for production by zone, and immediate problem-solving and feedback.
An example: When the work itself shrinks
These were reductions in physical workload against the previous design baseline, won by designers, production engineers, workers, planners and buyers reviewing the work together.
“Technological convergence is, at bottom, the convergence of people.”