Situation
Supplier of transmission components for automobile and heavy equipment industries
Critical Issue
Production could not keep up with customer demand and customer was threatening to award the contract to another supplier, which would impact profitability.
Reasons
One department had three shifts working seven days a week in an unsuccessful attempt to meet production quotas. Senior leadership initially thought that solving the problem would require more machinery purchases and hiring of works to operate them. This was a high ricks strategy because of the large capital expense, couple with an increased headcount.
Vision
Senior leadership realized that they should first learn the production capability of their existing machinery and the reasons for the substantial production downtime they were experiencing. Their vision was to optimize and improve the utilization of the equipment they already had before approving capital expenditures for new machinery.
Hertzler Systems Provided
The means for tracking each machine by the minute, recording setup, maintenance, and run time. GainSeeker automatically captured and served as the central repository for that information and that supplied by the machine operator. Now they could create multilevel Pareto charts so they knew the time spent on specific tasks such as electrical problem resolution or other adjustments. Armed with new knowledge about process variation, the machine operators now knew the circumstances under which they should make changes to the process.
Result
In a six-month period, the department reduced their work week to five days, saving the company nearly $100,000 in overtime. Plus, output increased over 25% while scrap and defects were minimized. Additional machinery purchases were deemed unnecessary.
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