Feb 3, 2015 | Posted by Ben Thompson
Hey blog fans I am back with another update for what is going on with TnT @Durabody. Lately we have been doing some “winter cleaning” at Durabody. We removed some of our cumbersome A-frames we used to store side walls and made a spot on the side of our catwalk so that one set of finished walls to be stored for use on the line. This both brings the walls closer to where they are used and saves us valuable floor space.
Here is a quick video of our frame on its way out:
Such a large piece of storage equipment, far to large for our needs.
With some of that new found space we have been creating a centralized location for our door sub assembly and installation area. Moving all of this equipment around is a big job, but through some good planning we managed to safely move the area with little to no impact on production. We had the chance to “play” with some power tools too! Fastening the equipment in place as safety is always our top priority.
Now that the area is out in the open we are able to see and solve big issues like inventory, storage and material flow for this area. For example we found 26 door kits that had been raided at different times for various parts and consolidated them into 15 full kits. Upon finishing our root cause analysis for this problem we found out the cause is that these parts are consumed by more then one area and that certain parts have a higher demand. We have had team members get engaged with helping us solve these problems and are looking at changing the way we order our parts for this area to become more cost effective.
We weren’t able to identify this problem before because the area was so well hidden. We simply couldn’t see how poorly presented our parts were (top right) and how difficult it was for us to know what inventory we had let alone find the right parts when we needed them. This goes to show how a simple change can lead to a big impact, but that these big projects don’t have to taken on in an “all in one shot” mentality. A proper balance of planning and doing just a little bit more each day makes it much easier to,
Keep
Calm,
and
Kaizen
On!
