Situation
Vice President Operations, professional audio equipment manufacturer.
Critical issue
Although the company had made major improvements to production throughput and first pass yield, they had reached a plateau and wanted to push through to the next level. To achieve this they needed better knowledge management, especially of repair data, in real time.
Reason
Critical production repair data was being collected in a variety of ways in a host of different data systems. No standard processes were in place that prescribed or enforced what to do with data. Time to capture data was too high, and the data that was captured was not used effectively because it was not timely or accessible.
Vision
The leadership team wanted to establish a company-wide, user-friendly database that would further their company’s evolution into a data-driven, fix-to-root-cause culture. They knew they would have to refine and improve defect categorization, and define processes to enforce the use of data to investigate, resolve to root cause, and monitor quality.
Hertzler Systems provided
Working in concert with the customer’s engineers, we built a comprehensive, integrated, data collection system that captures repair data from any one of eleven processes, in real time. Once captured, all data resides in GainSeeker Suite in a single, central data repository. There it is accessible to all staff for tracking defect levels (DPMO) over time, and for automated drill down Pareto analysis.
Results
The initial investment was recouped in less than three months (according to the CFO), with a ROI after seven months of 171%. Impressively, only a small portion (2%) came from reducing the cost of data collection. Ninety-eight percent of the return came from increased throughput and improved first pass yield.
By making repair data more accessible, more visible, and more timely, the company was able to reach previously unimagined yield levels.
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