The analysis has shown that there are many issues to address. Gathering all these points and brainstorming has revealed that simple solutions can be implemented to the benefit of almost all these issues.
Total Quality Management (TQM) vital principles
From the beginning, one of the main challenges was to make all of the different departments work closer together. A lot of mistakes and wasted time have been due to misunderstanding or lack of communication.
TQM has been chosen for its holistic methods and also for its main principles: the Customer/Supplier chain.
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| Customer - Supplier Chain |
In our organization, that means each department has to ensure:
- Each incoming/out coming part adheres to our quality standards.
- All information has been received/sent.
- Delivery times have been met.
- The communication between supplier and customer is efficient.
The targets were:
- Having a finished product that meets our external customer quality standards.To avoid mistakes and misunderstandings.
- To resolve the problem of delays to manufactured products, detecting any defects very early on.
- To improve our system of cost control, knowing the real time involved in manufacturing each sub-assembly.
- To improve the communication between departments.
To achieve these goals, we had to provide the right tools as well as a document to fill out with all the information required. We created a document called the "Reception Document" and provided it to each department.
Each manager and operator has been instructed to refuse the part or product if one of the above requirements was not adhered to, or if the Reception Document was not filled out.
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| Screenshot Reception Documents |
To simplify the process and to meet 5S rules, we assigned each department a "Receiving Area".
Each time a part or product moves from one department to another, the item has to be delivered in that area, like a normal courier company (an address to deliver and a signature to confirm the delivery).
Manufacturing books
Of course another main concern of every manufacturing site is the standardisation. We cannot implement efficient solutions if we are not working in standard conditions.
Our main difficulty is that we are not a mass production site and almost every product is a new one coming from our engineering department. So, although the products cannot be standardised as we would like, the process can be.
To standardise our process we implemented a standard document called ‘Manufacturing Book’ made by the Engineering / Industrialisation department.
Basically, the document is a Bill Of Material (BOM) usually presented as a list of drawings to manufacture and consumables to purchase. The MFG books also show 3D screenshots helping everyone to understand, assembly procedures and specific Quality Controls.
Note 1: an interesting result of the 3D screenshots. The mechanics have preferred this method of presenting the assembly rather than procedures (also very detailed). We did an assembly test and the mechanics could fully assemble the products, so it has been decided to limit assembly procedures to specific cases such as hydraulic components. The work load of the design engineer has decreased.
Note 2: MFG Books templates have been sent to our headquarters in Paris. The system has been adopted immediately by the industrial department there. This new organisation has been approved after receiving feedback from sub-contractors who have said that this document helps them a lot, it's clear, easy to read and they understand immediately what they have to do. Consequences: phone calls to clarify drawings have been almost eliminated and manufactured parts are processed and delivered faster with less Non Conformance (NC).
Manufacturing Order
In the previous organisation, each part has its own Job Order Routine Sheet (JORS) with attached drawings. More than 200 JORS was necessary to manufacture 1 product and these JORS should be stored back so an employee should classify and sort them during 2 days. Delay and lost JORS were frequent. Tons of paper was wasted each year and the process couldn’t be easily understood.
The process also needed to be optimised and simplified to make it more logical for everyone. So we created the "manufacturing order" document (=list of drawings to manufacture).
The purpose of this document is to prioritise the manufacturing process for our products in order to optimise times and gather all the parts necessary for the welding department.The priorities are defined by each part's total process time from cutting to welding, classified from A (highest time) to D (lowest time). It is based on the Manufacturing Books.
This document is provided with all updated drawings and with a list of priorities.
It is divided into 4 categories:
- A: all parts to be cut and sent to subcontractors
- B: all parts to be cut, passing trough the bottleneck in production and/or sent to subcontractors
- C: all parts to be cut and going trough production
- D: all parts to be cut and not going trough production
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| MO Priorities: Priority 1(A); Priority 2(B,C); Priority 3(D) |
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| Manufacuring Order (MO) Priority 2 (B) |
Conclusion
- Reduction to the amount of paperwork (-95% to launch manufacturing orders)
- USD1800/year in paper & ink saved
- Simplified procedures for sub-contracting parts, purchasing, finance reporting…
First results after 6 months monitoring
43% of the products had an average delay of 36 days
(previously: 92% of the products had an average delay of 200 days)
Time was needed to promote the new methods. To simplify the launch of manufacturing, we had to implement methods in Engineering, Industrialisation, Logistic and planning departments. People had difficulties understanding why we may these choices and there some resistance: comments such as "problems with traceability (ISO), this is too simple to work, no you cannot do that, we always work like that... " Classic resistance to something new.
Each point has been clarified: a prototype has been launched and we adjusted/added elements on MO, MFG Books, Reception documents to adhere and improve our quality manual, internal procedures, custom procedures (JTC is under free zone)...
Investment/Cost
Absolutely NO cost. We save money and time by simplifying the procedures: drawings are protected in plastic covers, a list of drawings to process replaces hundreds of single manufacturing orders, colour codes and complete manufacturing folders. All of these reduce the amount of time taken to launch the manufacturing from 2 days to just 3 hours.
After 6 months of monitoring, everyone is used to working with these new documents. They provide a clear and understandable vision for managers (from manufacturing to purchasing and also the general manager), by reducing the paperwork. The PRP department now (planning) spends all of its time following the parts and reacting immediately if any constraint appears. Communication has improved.
