Industrial – Introduction of “flow” to increase capacity and schedule adherence
Background
A market leading supplier of engineering products in a buoyant market, facing the challenges of having to significantly increase productivity and capacity and reduce costs to deliver profitable growth. Its manufacturing facility had issues with complex synchronisation of product flows, high WIP, set-up constraints and ageing equipment
What We Did
-
Completed a detailed review of the manufacturing operations, planning processes and existing capital investment plan
-
Outsourced non-core competences following Make versus Buy
-
Identified the major constraints to throughput and increased short term capacity (OEE) of these constraints through better planning and operations management
-
Simplified and improved material flow through manufacturing systems re-design
-
Introduced visual management to increase responsiveness and maintain flow
-
Validated £1m investment in new capital, including bespoke equipment
Results
-
Capacity increase of 95%, with actions in place to add another 30% to match new demand.
-
Productivity increase of 40%
-
Output increased to 350 cylinders per week and on target to achieve 400 with order book uplift
-
New operations and work-in-progress layout implemented
-
New capital installed and revised flow line implemented
-
Weakness of poor equipment reliability overcome with new equipment or dedicated fast response back-up plans
-
Improved Planning to generate optimum sequence and alignment of cell schedule