Question :
Company A is a small electrical manufacturing business in the Midwestern United States. The major products of Company A are industrial switchgears and switchboards.
Company A has a wide variety of customers located all over the world, ranging from general contractors, to industrial facilities, to large commercial power grids. Although the manager had knowledge about how lean manufacturing could help the company, the workers at Company A had yet to complete a lean manufacturing project, and expressed their desire to transform the facility using Lean/Sigma strategy in order to increase the efficiency of their plant.
Although Lean/Sigma has potential applications enterprise-wide in Company A, the switchboard unit was chosen as the starting point of this lean transformation project, since it is the major manufacturing section of the facility and involves the highest amount of personnel and equipment.
The first step in creating a value-stream map is to collect data that represents the current status in the facility. The Lean/Sigma team visited Company A's production facility and performed two walkthroughs with the manufacturing manager, tracing the paths that the material and information flow through the production facility of Company A. Based on the collected information, the current value-stream map of Company A's facility is generated.
1. What is the cycle time for the welding process?
2. What is the cycle time for the entire process or system?
3. What is the system cycle time?
4. What is the throughput time?
5. What is the percent value added time in this process? What is the percent non-value added time in this process? Which of the activities can be considered value-enabling and based on your answer, what is the percent value-enabling time in this process?
6. If the system operates 8 hours a day with an average of four switchboards being ordered every working day, what is the takt time?
7. If demand is 5 switchboards per day, what is the takt time?
8. What would you do in the second situation (referenced in part 7)?
9. Discuss your results and comment on the system ability to handle the demand.
10. The current value-stream map of Company A allowed the team to visualize the current operation situation in the facility. There were many sources of waste in the current system that added no value to Company A's production. Since the purpose of lean manufacturing is to reduce or eliminate waste, the Lean Sigma team defined a future value-stream map .
Based on the provided future value stream map, explain what lean six sigma tools are used here based on your knowledge and understanding. Provide one or two ideas using other lean six sigma tools to improve the process.