Increased Productivity & Quality Levels
One of Aster’s principals was employed by a global consumer electronics
manufacturing company to increase productivity and improve quality
levels.
The factory, based in the north east of England, had been established
for a number of years manufacturing colour television sets (CTVs) for
the UK market. It had however grown so quickly that the workforce of
over 200 staff lacked unity and leadership.
Our principal was employed with a view to achieving the following objectives: -
- Increase Productivity by up to 20%.
- Increase first time yield at both test and final inspection by 10%.
- Create an environment of teamwork across functional departments
- Improve factory communication processes
At the start of the project the factory output of CTVs was approx.
12,000 sets per week made up of 14” portables through to 24” Fast Text
models. The most ‘accepted’ CTVs produced by any one line in any day
was approximately 700 sets.
A 5S & 7 Wastes of lean programme was quickly implemented to highlight all the ‘waste’ in the
processes and improvement activities were initiated to tackle the
productivity issue. New performance indicators were introduced in
conjunction with production management team.
It quickly became clear that the productivity of the factory was being
significantly affected by the cumulative affect of poor first time
yields throughout the factory’s many processes. By tackling the yield
issue first, it would theoretically be possible to improve the
productivity by the elimination or reduction of rework, double handling
and other non-value added activities.
Improvement teams were set up across departments to look at particular
problems that affected the quality of the product and hence the output
of the facility.
Pareto and Tally charts were used to monitor quality levels from the
various processes and the bottlenecks in the process were tackled to
increase the overall output of each of the 4 main production lines.
Successive checking was successfully introduced to each of the assembly
stages. So successful was this initiative that the line technicians who
had previously struggled to cope with line defects were now able to be
transferred to other value adding activities.
At the end of an 11-month period, the factory productivity had
increased by 40% to 20,000 sets per week with the model range being
increased by the addition of bigger wide screen sets in the UK factory.
Two of the four lines had consistently achieved daily out put figures
in excess of 1100 ‘accepted’ sets per day.
Quality defects had fallen by an average of 27% and the workforce had
been organised and structured into self- managing teams across
functional divides.
Lisa Wilson 4th February 2004
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