Lean Manufacturing: Redesigning The Plant for 10 Second Takt Times
Lawn & Garden Tool Manufacturer $24mm Sales Revenue
A
major manufacturer and
supplier of non-powered, lawn and garden, industrial and agricultural
tools to the consumer products market sought to improve its
manufacturing operations. The goal was to design a manufacturing system
that would result in a 10 second Takt time.
The current shovel head production environment was characterized by old
equipment and technology, low value-add time, outdated processes,
excessive downtime, excessive work-in-process inventory, and an
ineffective equipment layout and physical material flow.
We identified major cost savings opportunities as primarily being in the type of equipment used in heat-treating, tempering, quenching, tumbling, and lacquering. The fluidized bed furnaces not only spewed out filthy aluminum oxide creating a plant-wide dirty working environment, but also created a deposit of scale. The oil quench worsened the scale forcing the company to add more cost to the shovel heads by tumbling them. Our review of the shovel production facility also revealed substantial weaknesses in the company's ability to respond to an increasingly shortened market lead-time with consistent and repeatable high quality product, fast response, and competitive prices.
For example, shovels could be currently assembled within a 30 second Takt time while it had taken up to 16-33 days for a shovel head to make its way from blanking to lacquer coating. The main causes were found in basic shovel production infrastructure: centralized operations, batch processing, physical layout by process, and type equipment and methods used to manufacture shovel heads. These findings translated to substantial opportunities for improvement. The examination of the facility revealed significant opportunities for reduction in throughput time, floor space, inventory, indirect labor, and overhead, while maintaining high quality.
We proposed the company pursue lean manufacturing for shovel head manufacture consisting of the following features:
The results were as follows: 