Cardboard City, the first Kaizen for new equipment

Years ago I read an article by James Womack, were he talked about all the kaizen activities taking place on new equipment after delivery. He asked the question is this Kaizen or the waste of rework. I have come to the conclusion that it is a bit of booth. We need to take every opportunity to improve our work. If we are doing improvements that could have been seen though simulations or other activities prior to equipment build then it is rework. If the improvement is form new learning along the lean journey then it is kaizen.

I was asked by a production manager to look at an assembly cell that was a year old and not making parts fast enough. A second line was being added and the teams were working 7 days a week. With the manager I walked to the cell to see what was happening. The cell had solid walls, big turn tables with many robots welding in the darkness of the line. The team members were all standing waiting to the robots to perform there work. To get a better view we climbed onto the mezzanine of the line installed the other side of the aisle. From the new vantage point we could see the movement of the material and the robots. The Equipment needed to be rearranged.

Dave gathered the process Engineer, the Welding Engineer responsible to the line. We sat in an office and came up with a new design for the equipment. The Process engineer (another Dave) asked if I have ever seen a full scale simulation of a work cell. I had heard of this before, but not done it. I replied with do you mean cardboard city? The next day a small group of people interested in our project gathered to try building and experimenting with card board city.

We started with building tooling bases, and tooling to hold the components we would be loading into the tools, in the orientation needed for optimal welding. Once the tooling was built we arranged it according to the plan we had drawn. We trialed the standard work pattern that was planned. Checked the result against the plan and needed to change the pattern. This repeated many times, changing part location, adding in auto eject, changing walk direction. We kept trying and, until we found a standard that we believed would work.

Now for the report out. The entire management team was invited out to our little experiment. We showed the current condition, and then showed our proposed solution complete with standard work demo. The GM actual got up and performed the standard work. He was able to complete the needed work on time. We shared the cost of the new cell and or belief that the old cell and the additional cell could be replaced with the new one for 10% of the original, and use 50% of the labour. We were kicked off to start the construction of the cell.

A large banner hung over the work area “Monster Garage” We had no new robots, tooling anything. All of the parts to build the new line came from spare parts, decommissioned lines. The Team building the line was given freedom to do what was needed to make the vision come true. A few months passed, the line was built, the original manager and engineer were move onto other projects. It was now time for the trial run before the line went into production.

None of the team who designed the line were there. The team members started loading the line, and were not meeting the expected output. The new manager was up in arms mad about the lousy line he had been given. Dave, and Dave, were called out to explain how this line was allowed to be built. Dave the engineer looked at the line and said we need Paul he has a trick that makes this work. My phone rang, I hurried down to the line with all of the standard work experiment data from cardboard city. The team was trying to load the machines in a clock wise order, but the line had been designed to be loaded counter clock wise against the flow of material. We taught the standard as planned. The Line ran and met rate on its first day. This had never happened before.

The senior leadership team looked at Dave, Dave, and myself and declared that cardboard city will be used on every new equipment design from now on.

Since the use of cardboard cities began in the corporation assembly lines have been getting smaller, part presentation, materials delivery team member work load have been considered and are improving with every layout.

I am writing this as the first card board city designed line is coming to the end of its life, and being deconditioned. This line became the pilot line in our facility for 5S, Standard Work, One Piece Flow, TPM, Load Leveling, Just In Time Shipments. It has been great working with different team on this line of the many years it ran. The number of people developed, belief windows changed, from the start of this line to today is just astounding.

I need to thank everyone who worked on this project with me over the years. I am proud of all the work everyone has done, the learning, growing and changes we have made over the years.

Thank You.

Paul Hill

The Lean Geek