Page 275 - How To Implement Lean Manufacturing

252 Cha pte r S i x tee n

Zeta Cell, 5 Stations
50

Takt time, 39 secs
40
Design Cycle Time 35 secs.
Cycle time, secs 20
30

10

0
1 2 3 4 5
Station
FIGURE 16-5 Zeta cell balancing graph.

An Effort to Get This Approved
I presented these analyses to management and thought I would be embraced as a Lean
hero. Quite the contrary … No one in management wanted to implement the new plan;
no one from quality, no one from production, no one from engineering; not one man-
agement person. As far as any logical reasons for them to resist the change: They had
none. It fit with their Lean initiative, the people were already trained, and we only
needed to move one machine about 18” and re-anchor it and then rearrange the work
tables. It was a huge money maker, and it was as simple as it comes—but the unified
reaction was that it should not be done now. “Maybe later,” they said. I have heard this
“maybe later” phrase many times, and it usually means, “not if I have anything to say
about it.” So I dropped the issue for the time being.
They Had Other Problems, Which Created Opportunity
About that time, we had been investigating some warrantee returns that we thought
could be related to the earlier problems. The failure analysis was not clear but it pointed
to the root cause possibly being that the units were dropped during production, creat-
ing some hidden internal damage, and the hidden damage did not show up until after
about 50 hours of operation, hence the warrantee issues.
That was all I needed. With the failure analysis report in hand, I explained that the
ten person, large work cell with all the excessive handlings, routinely allowed a lot of
dropped product to the floor, which was accurate. They had two options. Scrap all
dropped product or close up the cell and eliminate the opportunity to drop the units.
Suddenly they were interested in redesigning the cell—so we did.
Creating Flow and Establishing Pull-Demand Systems
We cut the cell size dramatically. Using their new table design, we created a cell using
less than 40 percent of the space of the ten-person cell. We moved the press and anchored
it. The supervisor was not convinced we could go to one-piece flow, so they set up four-
piece space kanbans at each work station. Workers were trained to stop producing if the
kanban location was full. Work instructions were modified to match the work stations,
and we were ready to start, which we did the next morning.