More improvement?
    Yes, things can get better!
    Here are 10 steps to creating a new flow.

by Mark Gooch

I was walking through one of our plants a couple months back and saw work cells that had completed a lot of transformation work (a one-week focused Kaizen Blitz, co-located work centers and inventory, “leveled” work groups/teams across shifts, etc.), yet it looked like there was more that could be gained. I have had that question asked of me many times, “Is there more opportunity in an area where we have already ‘completed’ a Kaizen Week?” The answer is YES! In fact, many times the greatest improvement is yet to come.

Very often, the first pass event or activity actually prepares a cell and work team for improvement. Often, the cell has not had any form of standard work applied until the first event week is completed. Second, a favorite saying of mine begins to take shape: “You never know how much you do not know until you know!” In other words, what do you look for when you aren’t sure what you are looking for?

To illustrate this, let me give you a detailed example of one cell I worked with in the past three months and the additional things we found.

Cell details/data:
A cell with five people on the work team, and three shifts of work equals 15 total people. The lead time of a part starting new in the product flow would complete in 36 hours. Inventory turns in the cell (WIP) was four days. Approximately 1,800 square feet of floor space was being used. On the surface, not bad numbers, until we looked at the key metric, Takt time for the cell, and realized everything was severely distorted! Here’s what we found.

Takt time for the cell was 16 seconds. The summation of individual work station cycle times was 45 seconds. The quick formula for minimal staffing is the sum of the cycle times divided by Takt time. In this case, we needed 2.8 people per shift — we had five. When the leadership team watched the activities in the cell and monitored what everyone was doing they found that all employees were busy 100 percent of the time, so the formula had to be incorrect, right? WRONG! Four of the five people were over-producing 100 percent of the time. Inventory was stacked up between each work center and the team members were actually batching and pushing batches of inventory from one work center to the other. The fifth person was running from station to station helping to “expedite” parts, aligning parts for packaging, moving “large” skids of parts from one work center to another, usually out of the cell first, then back in later, and so forth.

After four hours of watching the flow of the product, collecting multiple time observations to get good, consistent information, counting inventory counts and seeing which workstations demanded attention and which ones could be “loaded” to let the machine do its job and then unload or let the machine discharge itself, we went to a conference room with a couple of the cell members and the team leaders to lay out the new flow.

Creating a new flow
1. The first thing we did was eliminate all “storage” areas between work centers. We moved the equipment as close together as we could possibly get it without creating an unsafe position.
2. We set all material to be “charged” from outside of the cell — never interrupt the flow of material or work when moving material into the cell!
3. If a machine could unload itself we provided plastic (PVC) shoots or tubes to direct the material to the loading surface of the next work center. If the machine had to be unloaded manually, we modified the unload mechanism to be a very “light” touch device. Most of this was accomplished with springs, levers and quick clamps.
4. None of the work centers required more than eight or nine seconds of processing time and just two required someone to be by the equipment during the total processing time. Therefore we created a movement path for the operators to move with the part, escorting it from center to center if the machine did not unload it to the next center on its own. In other words, the employees’ natural walking from station to station became the material movement mechanism.
5. All inventory inside the process was completed, then removed from the cell. No additional inventory was produced until we were ready to resume production. This by itself made more than 450 square feet of floor space available.
6. We divided all production activity into two flow paths and removed material support and one subassembly process from the cell flow. This material support and subassembly work was given to a third person located outside the cell and next to the work station requiring the subassemblies.
   We also discovered that the subassembly required a 60 minute curing activity so a batch size was developed — a 60 minute batch. We created a buffer quantity of one batch that the cell used with one batch in reserve, hence a two-bin system of inventory control. When the first bin was completed and the second bin became the “use” bin, the third person in the cell immediately produced a new bin of subassemblies.
   This process took less than 10 minutes. Placing the parts in a position that FIFO was used to remove the subassemblies, the 60 minute cure time was met, inventory never ran out and the max amount of inventory at the work center never exceeded two hours’ worth. (Compare that to the four days of inventory prior to the event.)
7. We created single piece flow, continuous of product. No work center produced more than Takt time, and all parts were moved from center to center by the operator or the machine itself.
8. After three hours of realignment, we started the cell back into production, with 2.5 people per shift not 5. In other words, a 50 percent productivity improvement. Our results were “amazing” to everyone involved, including the operators. The two operator’s flow paths were each 16 seconds. The “.5” person’s material support and subassembly activity was eight seconds, and within the actual cell production activity, therefore it did not impact lead time of the product. With that in mind, after three days of production, our new lead time, from start of new part until in a box and ready to ship was 32 seconds compared to the 36 hours (a greater than 99 percent improvement!). Internal WIP was 12 pieces of inventory compared to four days’ worth before we started.
9. What do you do with a “.5” person in a cell?
If that person never leaves the cell, you really have 1 person not .5. So, we aligned a second cell next to the cell we worked with and moved similar material support work from the cell’s work content and used the second half of the .5 person in the second cell — true improvement for both cells.
10. The final metric we saw improved was the combined cycle times. Remember, prior to our changes it was 45 seconds. After our changes it dropped to 40 seconds; an 11.1 percent improvement. How? Remember our work in letting the machines unload parts when they could and having the people remove and move the parts as they walked to the next work center? Those two actions reduced the five seconds.

And there’s more to come
And we accomplished all this in four hours of observation, three hours of data analysis, three hours of cell realignment and one day of observing and tweaking the process in the new flow.

So, was there more improvement after one event? Well, the data says it was nothing short of amazing. The best thing was that we identified seven actions to reduce another 10 to 12 seconds of processing time, a 25 to 30 percent additional productivity opportunity, and we did not even deal with raw material inventory.

Do you think we should have another event?

The journey is not easy, but it is absolutely exciting and never dull. Drop me a line or note and let me know how your journey is going: mark.gooch@pentair.com.

Mark is vice president of Lean enterprise for Pentair Inc. He has held senior level positions with GE Aircraft Engines, Goodrich Aerospace and Williams-International and has worked with operations from 15 people to organizations of 30,000. Contact Coach Gooch at 763-843-9866; E-mail: markgooch@juno.com.

This article appeared in the October/November 2006 issue of MRO Today magazine. Copyright 2006.

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