Did you know, one of the well-known military hardware producers was able to reduce the lead time by 80% by implementing root cause analysis?

One of the well-known military hardware producers had been experiencing issues regarding production. The costs were getting too high, the delivery performance was not at acceptable levels, also they were facing difficulties in scheduling as well.  The organization was also facing quality issues.

The organization decided to address all these issues and sort it out. For that, the organization began with a root cause analysis of the problems. Soon the organization realized that most of the scheduling difficulties were inbuilt. As per the contract, the fixed liner delivery requirements were scheduled for eighteen months in length, and the rules of their lot-size were causing too much uncertainty in production schedules. 

The only solution for these issues was to eliminate constraints that didn’t allow them to produce at the same rate as the delivery requirements. A few of these issues were knitting of electronic components rest of them were of the set-up costs. After identifying these issues, the implementation of the lean journey began. The organization began by implementing the Single Minute Exchange of Die (SMED) which allowed them to improve their production speed.

Once this was accomplished, they implemented kanban signals by replacing it with subassembly work orders, significantly reducing complexity and cost. This phenomenal reduction of work in process inventory reduced the amount of scrap and rework consistently.

When sequential inspection took place, it immediately caught defects and significantly improved the ability to define true root causes. Guaranteed devices were then introduced and applied to eliminate such issues.

With a span of just a few months, lead times were reduced by 80%, On-time delivery reached and continued at ~100%, the space of the shop floor reduced to half, the production had started to yield double, overall productivity increased by more than 20%, and much more.

Hence, as you can see, lean tools can help one organization in such diversity, that no area can go unbenefited from. Root cause analysis when applied can identify the real reason behind the problem and the lean tools can help you solve those problems. The same can happen in your organization. So, have you started doing root cause analysis to identify the real problems in your organization?