Jul 14, 2014 | Posted by Ben Thompson
Hey there blog fans, hope your having a great start to your week. As for me I want to tell you guys about one of the great kaizen adventures I had last week at my work placement with Durabody. We have been plugging away at kaizening the way we fasten floors to frames of bodies and trailers at Durabody and determination payed off last week.You see the current way places a lot of burden on our team members. Between drilling placing and impact driving bolts into the floor there is a lot of hard work. We found in the tool crib a sight for sore backs.
There was a drilling tool with a built in pneumatic assist that was a little worse from wear, in a rather unusable state. This tool had the potential to drive a bolt through the wood floor and into the crossmember of our frames fastening the floor in one single motion per screw. So we endeavoured overtime to understand what was keeping this would be star player from being the Quarter back of our all star floor fastening team. As a team we have incrementally eliminated a continuum of problems, structural deficiencies, pressure settings, depth adjustment, operating standards etc., testing it on and off line, bringing this tool from retirement due to catastrophic failure to a 3% failure rate. But last week we wanted more!
We were not ready to except a 3% failure rate! We knew this tool has the potential to lift the burden of floor installation from the backs of our hard working team member without failure and faster then our current process. Last week we achieved 22.5 sec per screw vs the current process of 39.4 sec per screw, nearly cutting our time in half. The cherry on top is that we shrunk our failure rate by another 2.5% to a 0.5% with only 1 in 211 screws failing in a whole truck body floor.
So, does this kaizen victory mean we are ready hang up our kaizen hats and move on to the next project? No sir! We aim to make sure we can reproduce these fantastic results and as always is our aim improve upon them. The team and I are aiming high to shrink our time per screw to a 12 sec average and hope to have a 0% failure rate. We feel the worst is behind us and we will continue to,
Keep
Calm
and
Kaizen
On!
