Top Editors ... Lean manufacturing

Title: Lean manufacturing
Date: 17/07/2007
Autor: By Claire Rowan

As margins come under increasing pressure, manufacturers are forced to seek ways to reduce losses in time, material, energy and quality in order to sustain profitability

Processing priorities have changed dramatically over the years and monitoring and reducing waste is now critical to survival for any manufacturer.
“Fifteen or twenty years ago, quality was key, and process development was focused on reducing manual labour,” said Ulla Edling, former production director, Carlsberg Sweden at the Food Factory of the Future conference held at SIK (the Swedish Institute for Food & Biotechnology). “Then came stock turnover as a priority. Now these are all taken for granted, and our attention has turned to lean manufacturing.”
Ms Edling stressed that anything that is done in the plant that a customer is not prepared to pay for is a loss. “All unnecessary transporting or handling of product, too much stock, any defects, rejects or rework, as well as everything you throw away on the line: energy, sugar, packaging etc constitutes a loss,” said Ms Edling. “If your quality is not up to standard, or if the production stops for any reason, for however long, be it because you don’t have enough material or your machine was not serviced properly, this contributes to your losses.”
Carlsberg has already saved €5million at one of its plants in Falkenburg, Sweden, due to increased efficiency and capacity; by reducing wastage in its energy and water consumption; and optimising the staffing of the plant, for example. Such figures provide significant motivation for undertaking a systematic improvement or lean manufacturing programme.
“Lean manufacturing involves leadership and competence at all levels, clear responsibilities, teamwork, and proper standards and quality systems,” said Ms Edling. She stressed that lean manufacturing is not just about the quality of your systems, but the quality of your management. Håkan Nordblom, managing director of Direkt Chark in Sweden agreed that leadership was the most important factor in achieving lean manufacturing, and that the organisation itself had to have a lean philosophy. Direkt Chark has already achieved a 15 to 20% increase in efficiency during the past year by implementing its lean manufacturing philosophy.
“You have to understand the philosophy and have it in your heart before you can build on it. Management has to operate both from the top down as well as the bottom up,” he said. “If you want the people in your organisation to start thinking, you don’t just give them the answers, you ask the right questions. The processes must be well defined and each individual’s responsibility must be clear.”
As part of its lean manufacturing programme, Direkt Chark held mini seminars
internally to train and to share with its plant personnel, and started improvement groups for all lines in the plant.
“It is important to have the involvement of your people, to listen to your employees and implement their suggestions,” said Mr Nordblom. “Lean manufacturing is not about big investments because the knowledge is
usually within the company.”

Waste reduction
Another company that has implemented lean manufacturing principals successfully is the ice cream manufacturer Frederick’s Dairies in the UK, which achieved a 30% increase in manufacturing efficiencies and a 50% reduction in waste over a six month period. This was accomplished, not by any capital expenditure, but by rigorous prioritising, then solving of any production problems. The company drew on the expertise of the specialist consultancy firm, Newton Consulting, to work with the shop floor teams to create a sustainable system of performance improvement.
“Firstly, we implemented a system whereby problems were quantified and then prioritised by cash value to the business, thus ensuring that our limited resources were always directed towards our most important problems,” said Newton consultant, John D’Arcy. The project resulted in the solving of numerous problems previously considered to be ‘the nature of the beast’ and therefore ‘unsolvable’.
“We were able to complement the engineering skills on site, develop problem solving skills within the engineering and production departments, and ensure that the limited resource available was always working on the business critical problems, not just fire-fighting,” said Adam Cleevely, a fellow consultant with Newton. “A major challenge facing the team was increasing output on a choc-ice line. The line relied on the high availability of five coupled machines, all of which were underperforming.”
The case packing machine, which was stopping up to 20 times per hour, was found to be the main contributor to rework on the choc-ice line, and by developing an accumulation system before the case packer Newton successfully ‘decoupled’ this part of the line. This initiative alone increased efficiencies by 9%. The implementation of the accumulation system then highlighted the issues with upstream machines, and by methodically studying these, a further 50 permanent changes were made to improve performance.
“Frederick’s had technical issues common across the industry. All lines suffered from numerous short duration, high frequency downtime and waste problems,” said Mr D’Arcy. “On one line, over 15% waste was eliminated by monitoring the pattern of failure of 504 repeating moulds. Once we had found the faulty moulds, the problem was easily identified and rectified over a weekend.”
A further study was made at the wrapper in-feed and out-feed to identify the largest causes of waste and downtime. One by one, the feeder guides were redesigned, timings were perfected and the uniformity of the product was improved. Fifteen improvements reduced the cost of waste and downtime to the wrapper by 73%.
“Newton’s involvement meant that many things that had previously been known as factual limitations on operational efficiency were removed,” said Frank Frederick, managing director of Frederick’s Dairies.

Personnel
The unnecessary movement of personnel can also have a crucial impact on profitability. Puddings & Pies, a UK pie manufacturer, was able to reduce its wastage dramatically and boost productivity following its participation in a lean manufacturing project that unusually involved its staff using pedometers to measure the distances they walked during production. On analysis by the South West Manufacturing Advisory Service (MAS), brought in to support Puddings & Pies with its lean manufacturing initiative, results showed that staff walked on average five miles during each shift.
By designing a more efficient factory layout, and relocating machinery and ovens, for example, South West MAS was able to reduce wasted movements.
“Although it is an unusual technique, by using the pedometers we discovered that staff were walking excessively and we have been able to decrease this distance by more than 70%,” said Simon Lock, South MAS consultant.
“Essentially, what you don’t measure, you don’t know,” said Ron De Keersmaeker, sales & marketing director Benelux and beverage cluster leader Central Europe, Tetra Pak, which works extensively with its customers throughout the world to optimise their new as well as existing processes. “Our work starts with the equipment and people and then you measure.”
For Mr De Keersmaeker lean manufacturing is a policy of continuous improvement. “We don’t stop after we have put the machine into commission. A tiny percentage improvement in production makes a significant impact on the bottom line for our customer,” said Mr De Keersmaeker, who highlighted the ongoing relationship Tetra Pak has with Tropicana, which resulted in the installation of one of the most highly automated juice processing lines at Tropicana’s plant in Zeebrugge, Belgium. “When we developed the plant for Tropicana, we looked at the total factorydesign and built in specific line performance guarantees governing criteria such as product loss, energy efficiency, and quality,
for example. It is important to see lean manufacturing from a total line perspective, rather than just assessing the individual cost elements. You have to plan for it, describe it, set parameters and build them into the contract from the beginning, and then implement it.
“For Tropicana, product loss was key as its Not from Concentrate (NFC) juices are a high value product, so we built this into every element of the design of the plant from the outset, and then took this into the commissioning and the ongoing line improvement work, which brings big savings,” he said.
Tetra Pak bases its plant development around modular systems, which lends it to ongoing improvement. “With our modular approach we can easily go back to any individual model and upgrade it when the next generation of technology with optimised performance is available,” said Mr De Keersmaeker, who pointed out that recent alterations to Tetra Pak’s balance tank equipment within the company’s latest, Third Generation, Tetra Therm Aseptic Drink system (beverage pasteuriser), can now reduce product losses by 30%. “As consumption or logistics change within a large international organisation, one modular component of a line can be removed and easily slotted into another plant. It also helps with spare part management.”
Mr De Keersmaeker points out that from a lean manufacturing standpoint, investing in compatible modular formats throughout the organisation allows multinationals such as Tropicana (part of Pepsico) to draw on trained staff from one area of the organisation to train others and provide a transfer of knowledge within the group. For true lean manufacturing, he stressed, you have to take a helicopter view of your entire process, the whole plant and the whole company.