VELOCITY - DEE JACOB [54]
The big project – and Kurt went straight to it – was balancing the production line at Oakton and producing based on takt time. This project was – oddly, to Amy’s sensibilities – placed in two quadrants. Both were aligned in Big Payoff, but planted in Easy/Fast and Hard/Slow.
“Now, of course a balanced line means that we have trimmed all excess capacity from all processes, relative to demand. It’s often called ‘flattening’ or ‘leveling’ because that’s conceptually what we do; we level the line by moving people and adjusting job responsibilities so that everybody has just enough to do. Ideally nobody is overworked, but nobody is idle throughout the day. And the same with equipment capacities, too.
“The reason we have the balanced line in as both ‘easy’ and ‘hard’ is exactly that. In some areas of the plant it will be relatively easy to make adjustments and pull utilization above ninety-two or even ninety-five percent. In other areas, because of the diversity of the products being made, it’s going to be more challenging. And so, it’ll take longer. Like, you know, six or nine months instead of, say, three. Or one.”
Amy was pressing the dull end of her pen into her chin as she contemplated this.
“Well, I have a question here,” she said. “How can you balance the line to takt when you have such high variation in cycle times?”
“Because the only big variation in cycle time,” said Wayne, jumping in, “occurs at the autoclave. We’ll have to figure out how to deal with that later. In the meantime, we should be able to balance the rest of the line to takt without much trouble.”
“That’s right,” said Kurt. “And once we accomplish that, every phase of processing will have just enough or slightly more than enough capacity to finish its task within takt time.”
Amy reclined in her chair as she though about this, and let her gaze drift to Murphy Maguire, who had said nothing and showed no indication that he would. Then she said to Kurt and Wayne, “All right.”
Next was the application of Six Sigma to improve quality throughout the plant, but with the special priority of solving the intermittent and vexing hairline crack problem on some but not all Navy parts orders. So far, all efforts to eliminate it had failed, and it was felt that this would be a Hard/Slow project.
“Absolutely yes. Get on it,” said Amy.
And then there were the more ordinary Lean Six Sigma projects, though each one would be an involved exercise. Biggest of the “ordinary” LSS efforts, they would reconfigure the M57 Line, which was mainly where raw materials came together to form the actual composite.
Then they would mistake-proof – or apply poka-yoke – to the resin dye rack. They would add kanbans – a demand style of inventory replenishment – at certain places on the plant floor. They would do 5S in Shipping and make it neater, reorganize the Cooler, and so on and so on.
But what they would not do was re-engineer the Autoclave area. Much to Wayne’s and Kurt’s dismay, the plant’s autoclave – Godzilla – had little waste to be eliminated from it, other than the excess work crew. The process was simply time-consuming and sometimes complex. With regret, Wayne had concluded that they must leave Godzilla be.
“Excuse me,” Amy said, “but what is ‘Godzilla’?”
“It’s the autoclave, a very large piece of equipment,” said Wayne. “I believe its actual, technical name is … what is it, Murph?”
“The AC-1240-N,” said Murphy Maguire.
“And it is somewhat expensive to run, which was why I first thought it might be a good target. But it turns out that redesigning or replacing this monster would be hard and very expensive. So the only thing we can do with it in a Lean way is reduce the manpower – because between load changes, most of the crew just stands around. I think we can cut that way back. Other than that, we’ll just leave it alone until there is a capital budget big enough to junk it and