Illuminating bottlenecks within the manufacturing course of permits corporations like Miller Fabrication Options to persistently produce the merchandise OEM clients want within the desired timeframe. Constraints can’t essentially be pinpointed, nonetheless, just by observing work.
For 11 years, Miller Fabrication Options has been on a mission to repeatedly enhance its turnaround time and high quality processes through the use of lean manufacturing rules. Extra lately, we’ve got begun uniting our lean manufacturing processes with Six Sigma knowledge instruments.
Lean manufacturing focuses on effectivity and productiveness by means of waste discount; Six Sigma focuses on high quality by means of error discount. Pairing the statistical processes of Six Sigma — controls and knowledge assortment — with lean manufacturing drives additional enhancements in our processes.
Our preliminary knowledge assortment and evaluation challenge stemmed from a capability concern. Trying 12 months out, based mostly on buyer knowledge, we knew we might encounter a capability constraint on a CNC machine heart that has a selected fixture and machines a sure household of elements. We wanted to know the cycle occasions on the person elements inside that work heart so we might generate extra capability on the machine.
Our evaluation revealed that greater than half of every half’s cycle time was devoted to probing options for slicing the metallic. Of the 27 options being probed, 9 offered nearly no danger of being out of tolerance. By eliminating these 9 probes, we freed up a couple of minutes of cycle time on every half. Over the course of a day, these minutes added up and started to generate among the capability we wanted to fulfill our buyer’s timeline.
After that fast win, we eradicated extra probes by evaluating and modifying upstream processes. These efforts have elevated our capability to supply clients’ merchandise within the required time.Â
Since that preliminary challenge, our expanded Lean Six Sigma work has higher aligned initiatives with our band saws’ capabilities, improved our machine heart tooling high quality management processes and helped us establish developments and alternatives for high quality enhancements to make sure our clients dependably obtain merchandise that meet their expectations. We now are analyzing our welding processes to see the place we are able to scale back or get rid of non-value-added work.
We’ve additionally educated supervisors, crew leaders, mid-level managers, engineers and high quality management personnel in Six Sigma high quality methodologies, difficult them to establish the place they will apply these approaches of their areas. Consequently, extra alternatives have emerged for us to understand enhancements based mostly on this extra strategic and focused knowledge assortment and monitoring.
We’re not glad with solely the low-hanging fruit. Our Lean Six Sigma steady enchancment journey compels us to search out the next-level enhancements we nonetheless want to achieve, and we proceed to look tougher for the following enchancment alternative.
