Did you know, one of the leading automotive components manufacturing Organizations. That was able to improve their annual throughput by $1 million by implementing operational excellence tools for Production Improvement?

One of the leading automotive components manufacturing organizations was facing difficulties in improving the throughput of their day-to-day manufacturing processes. Issues such as low or no production process taking place for a long period of time while changing shifts were few of them. There were ideally 3 shifts and the average time taken to change the shift was 30 minutes. Organization was not able to bear the cost incurred with this unproductive time.

Operational Excellence Tools for Production

Hence, the management decided to implement operational excellence tools. The changeover processes were crafted in such a way that it would reduce the downtime and allow enough cleaning time and maintenance time for machines in the working area. The process was implemented on the team. This new process needed all the employees of the organization to spend a few minutes of their shift cleaning their workstation. and servicing their regular equipment and informing the operator who will replace them in the next shift about concerns or critical information of the machines or the procedures.

The operators of the previous shift were used to leaving their work incomplete, thus leaving for the following operator to complete their tasks. However, this was later put to an end and the operator in the next shift had to start the task fresh. Apart from this, to utilize the unproductive time, the operators of the previous shift were also supposed to finish the paperwork or any type of cleaning only once the new / replacing operator has begun working.

Utilizing the one and a half-hour that was wasted led to improved results. Streamlining the process of shift change drastically increased the production capacity thus increasing their annual throughput with $1 million. This process was then made a protocol to be followed by each and every unit of production across the plant.

Hence, as you can see, implementing operational excellence in the process can help an organisation improve with such a huge capacity of production. So, have you started implementing operational excellence tools?