Lean, Making the World Better One Improvement at a time.

Many years ago I was told that the purpose of lean is to make the world a better place, and that we do this with small little improvements many times. Each improvement should make a person’s life a little easier or better. So the story that I want to share is about how simple improvements can make huge impacts to the people.

The work center that this activity takes place on is a single person machine that is only a few square feet in size, welding a threaded tube to a stamping. Upon arriving at the station I introduce myself to the operator and let him know that I am going to watch him work for a while. Just like when I was instructed 18 years ago when my journey began. Just standing and watching I began looking at all of the motion the team member was doing and looking to see the waste in the process. The excess motion was immediately obvious, the waiting while watching the machine running, the over production evident in the stock pile of inventory around the machine. This was just the first 5 minutes of observation. Next I asked the team member what frustrated him the most about the work he was doing. He showed me that the parts were not loading properly and this was causing faults and defects, the auto eject was not lifting the parts out of the way of the tooling, causing him to have to move the parts out of the way before loading. The process was taking 50 seconds to produce the two parts. With the team member working for 30 seconds and waiting for 20 seconds while the machine ran.

The team member motion went like this:

1. Walk to a flow rack and pick a stamping,

2. Walk to a second flow rack and pick a second stamping,

3. Walk to the machine and load the stampings in the machine,

4. Walk to a third flow rack to pick 3 threaded tubes,

5. Walk to the machine and load those,

6. Walk back to the flow rack and get 3 more tubes,

7. Walk back to the machine and load those.

8. Cycle start the machine, and wait.

Even writing this out makes me tired.

So the simple changes, went as follows:

1. Move the two stampings to the flow rack so the team member can get both stampings at the same time, one in each hand, while the machine is running.

2. Next the treaded tubes were delivered inside the cell so the team member did not have to walk to get the tubes.

These changes took under 5 minutes.

The changes to fix the difficulty in loading and the ineffective ejector took a little longer requiring the help of a maintenance team member, but only an hour.

After the improvements the team member work is down to 15 seconds from 30 to perform the same tasks. The machine still runs for 20 seconds while the team member waits.

The team member is now much more productive and is moving much less. The team member was very happy that we spent the time to solve the problems that were plaguing him.

Next kaizen will be to add this station to another station to eliminate the waiting and over production. But that story will be another day.

Paul Hill

The Lean Geek

#kaizen #LeanManufacturing