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CULTURE CHANGE SERVICE INDUSTRY MANUFACTURING INDUSTRY

Case Studies and Articles:


United Seating and Mobility

case study

As with many companies, the challenges facing United Seating & Mobility include increasing expectations of quality products and services, pressure from customers to reduce prices, and competition from numerous competitors in an industry suffering through consolidation.

But by committing itself to becoming lean, United Seating – which produces customized wheelchairs, scooters and other mobility products – is not only surviving, but expanding as other companies fall by the wayside.

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A journey to  world class

shop floor

The Keg Racking area.

The Samlesbury brewery, now owned by Interbrew, has used its Asset Care programme as a key tool for pursuing cost reduction through more intensive use of plant

Samlesbury is one of the largest breweries in Britain, and has the capacity in its fermentation and maturation vessels to supply a pint of beer to every UK resident. As a 30 year old site in an increasingly competitive industry, cost reduction through improved asset utilisation was seen as a major issue for the future, and the vehicle for driving this was employee involvement through application of total productive maintenance (TPM) principles.

However, Samlesbury had previously tried TPM and failed. One anecdote told of an autonomous maintenance exercise which had resulted in a major item of equipment being covered with tags which were later just painted over.

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Everything in Pork Pie Order

worker

Pork pie and sausage roll maker Pork Farms Bowyers has invested significant resource and time into creating its own tailored shopfloor organisation programme. Steed Webzell reports

Shopfloor organisation is fundamentally important to a food manufacturer. It helps to fuel tidiness, which in turn can assist with achieving the necessary levels of cleanliness – particularly important among suppliers to the UK’s leading supermarket chains.At the Nottingham factory of Pork Farms Bowyers (PFB), the lack of organisation in the production department was of major concern.Accidents were also occurring with some degree of frequency.The company was convinced the two problems were related, and that the 5S technique could help to overcome both.Alongside this, with customer audits commonplace, PFB didn’t want to give any of its prestigious customers grounds for taking business elsewhere.

In the last two years the company has made giant steps towards radically overhauling its workplace organisation. One of the pioneers of the idea to transform PFB is manufacturing facilitator Jenny Perks.A change of role within the organisation, along with a three-day workshop presented by Productivity Europe at a nearby company in November 2000, convinced her, along with the company’s new general manager, that there would be a lot to be said for deploying 5S at PFB. “We knew it would be hard to build without the use of 5S as a starting point and a foundation,” she says.

After the workshop, Perks set about creating a promotional plan, aimed at informing everyone at PFB, from senior management to shopfloor operators, about the plans for 5S. In April 200, Productivity Europe consultant Paul Quayle presented his first of five twoday 5S workshops at PFB.Attendance was voluntary.“I was fairly confident they would succeed as soon as I saw who turned up for the first workshop,” he says.“This is always a good indicator that a company is prepared to support the initiative with resource.”

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THE USE AND ABUSE OF OEE

measure

Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) is fast becoming a widely used measure for the manufacturing industry, but it is also one of the more misunderstood and misused measures and causing much confusion.

What is OEE for?

The simple answer is “Improvement”. OEE is an improvement measure and is used as part of the improvement cycle. Unfortunately, much is made of the 85% ‘World Class Standard’ an arbitrary target found in the original TPM literature. Not only is this target out of date (Nissan in Sunderland are running welding lines at 92-93% OEE) it gives the wrong message. A customer has no interest in your OEE – that is an internal measure which relates to your efficiency and costs. The customer is far more interested in a measure such as On Time In Full (OTIF) i.e. did I get my order? Running a manufacturing business on an arbitrary efficiency measure rather than a customer satisfaction measure is a recipe for disaster. The best use of an OEE target such as 85% is to recognize that if you are reaching that level and the customer is still not getting his orders on time, then you may have a capacity constraint.

OEE does not tell us if we have a problem, the customer does. What OEE does do is help us analyze the problem and make improvements. This is why Toyota uses it as a spot measure on a particular machine where there is a capacity or quality problem. Calculating the OEE of anything other than a discrete machine or automated line is pointless; we have far better measures of the efficiency for a factory or department as a whole.

OEE developed out of the need for improvement groups to have a way of measuring and analyzing equipment problems as part of their Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve, Control cycle. OEE defines the expected performance of a machine, measures it and provides a loss structure for analysis, which leads to improvement. It can then be used as a tracking measure to see if improvement is being sustained i.e. if control is sufficient.

What does OEE measure? ...

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PRINTS OF DARKNESS: THE CHANGING WORLD OF PHOTO PROCESSING

No industry has experienced more evolutionary change in the last few years than that of photography. Over a five-year period, the photo production process went from 90% optical to almost completely digital, and it was no easy task for photo labs to adapt.

See how H&H Color Lab of Raytown, MO, saw the change coming and recognized that not only was the world “going digital,” but also that the pace of photo processing would increase significantly and that customers would need to be far better serviced.

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KEEPING THE PRESSES ROLLING, MORE EFFICIENTLY

Don’t think "lean" methods are just for businesses associated with manufacturing. They aren’t. And there is no better proof of this than North Jersey Media Group (NJMG) and the half-million dollar savings - minimum – it achieved from Lean Office techniques in just the first months of the program.

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IT'S A MIRACLE!

Ping Golf’s lean journey began with a seemingly unreachable goal: to continue producing the highest quality golf clubs in the industry, while building and shipping these custom fit clubs within 48 hours of receipt of order. It was certainly a formidable goal, one that might just take a miracle to accomplish.

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Submit a Case Study

Case Study Purpose

If your organization has been successful implementing Lean, your story could help another organization get their program started or moved to the next level. With so much working against manufacturing today, it is important that the manufacturing community work together to share learning, experiences and "next step" ideas to ensure U.S. Manufacturing remains a strong and vital part of the global economy.

The purpose of a Productivity Inc. case study is to highlight successful Lean improvements in order to provide insight to other organizations attempting to implement Lean in their own facilities.

In each case study, we encourage clients to speak frankly about their Lean improvements, and to describe in detail (by qualifying and quantifying) the challenges they faced and the achievements accomplished.

These “success stories” will be posted here for others interested in Lean to review.

Through exposure to these case studies, organizations attempting to implement Lean will gain an understanding of what is needed for a successful Lean improvement effort to take shape in their facilities. They will understand how their peers have used the techniques of Lean, how to get buy-in from leadership and associates and how to overcome issues and obstacles encountered along the way.

And your organization will be positioned as having the foresight to seek strategic methods to enhance productivity in order to help keep operating costs down, be more competitive and offer more value to their own customers.

What are we looking for?

Simply, we seek interesting accounts of clients who wanted to significantly improve the way they conduct business and who found dramatic success through Lean implementation. The ideal client exhibits excitement and much gratification over their program and is genuinely committed to pursuing further continuous improvement.

Selection Criteria

Case study candidates are selected for participation in this program due to their:

  • recognition of the business challenges they faced;
  • understanding of Lean methodologies;
  • foresight and appreciation of how Lean can work for them;
  • top down cooperation within the organization;
  • implementation of a variety of Lean techniques;
  • quantifiable successes as a result of the program, and
  • long-term commitment to a process of continuous improvement.
  • The Process

    Once your case study is approved a Productivity Staff Writer, will make contact to begin the process. The final case will not be published anywhere without your review, comment and final approval.

    Contact us for additional details.