An adhesive products manufacturer was facing an increase in order backlogs and extended turnaround times due to supply chain issues caused by the pandemic. They were not able to reduce the backlog without affecting quality.
Opportunities included:
- Planning, scheduling, and shop floor execution were not tied to reasonable standards
- Material yield issues were unmanaged leading to difficulty in order completion, causing unproductive re-runs
- Lack of active management of constraint machines
- Continual disruptions to the schedule were caused by material issues, ad hoc “cut ins”, priority changes and avoidable machine downtime
- There was a lack of KPI’s for planning, identification and management of production variances
Key changes included:
- Modified shift scheduling to provide continuous running of high-volume constraint machinery
- Stabilized scheduling methodology, utilizing updated standards and more productive runstrategies
- Established a downtime tracking system to provide categorization, visibility and enable a logicalapproach to the mitigation of downtime
- Installed equipment adjustments, speed standards and process changes to improve material yield
- Conducted leadership coaching in the concepts of Active Management and Employee Engagementfocusing on Constraint Management
- Installed Productivity, Efficiency, Utilization, Yield and overall OEE metrics
- SKU evaluation identifying low margin, low volume SKU’s consuming constraint machine run time
- Redesigned the layout of work cells to improve productivity
Through successful execution of the strategy, financial return significantly exceeded the originalupside value estimate by the end of the engagement, representing an 8.6:1 ROI.
The Results
Specific results include:
- Throughput increase of 26%
- Material Yield improvement of 27%
- 85% reduction of Schedule disruptions
- 108% improvement of OEE on high volume constraint machines
