Rapid Improvement

Rapid Improvement (RI) events at Kolbe & Kolbe initially focused mainly on end-to-end transaction and production flow, from sales and order entry to the loading docks, so the maintenance staff have only recently become “official” members of RI teams. The first maintenance member to be selected for a team was Chuck Rice, a Tech 1 Maintenance worker with 17 years on the floor.

Window assembly cell workers saw a need to cut the wait time for painted parts to assemble. Currently, all parts are painted in a centralized paint area and then transported to various cells for assembly. Their proposed solution, and challenge for Chuck’s team, was to devise a multiple gun fan sprayer that would paint parts and feed them directly onto a dryer installed right on the window assembly line.

This potential solution entailed many engineering challenges, not the least of which was the fact that the plant’s standard paint dryers are 60 feet long and take 18 minutes to dry parts. This unit would be just six feet long.

“Drying time in our long paint booths is about 18 minutes and we’re looking to get these parts dried and ready to pin up in just over one minute,” observes Bruce Bickford, plant maintenance foreman. “That’s a real rapid improvement,” he adds and laughs.

Related challenges forced the team to explore methods of drying, from air to heat lamps, the required conveyor speeds to adequately dry the parts in the space allowed in the dryer, and how to construct the dryer itself. From a full-sized wood dryer mock-up, modifications were made and the first unit is now nearly complete and ready to test in an assembly cell. Once it is perfected, the maintenance and engineering teams plan to build more units for other cells.

“A big aspect of this RI event was eliminating the need for parts to move from the paint shop after they’re painted to these assembly areas,” Rice says. “Now, with the sprayers in the cells, they’ll be able to spray and immediately assemble the unit with less handling, less chance of damage, and lots better productivity. It brings everything together in the cell.”

MRO Pro is sponsored by Streamlight.

This article appeared in the August/September 2006 issue of MRO Today magazine. Copyright 2006.

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