Declaring War on Inefficiency

Do you sometimes feel more like a fire fighter than a manager or a leader? Are you losing money to injection moulding machine downtime? Are products shipping behind schedule? Do you produce more scrap parts than good ones? Here is how one manager got his operation under control, and began planning instead of reacting.

Jim Krzyzewski is vice president and managing director at Nyloncraft Inc., a moulding operation with plants in Mishawaka, Indiana, USA, and Bowling Green, Kentucky, USA. Nyloncraft has 36 presses at its Mishawaka plant, ranging from 100 to 1,500 tons. It makes products for captive, automotive, marine, and handtool applications using about 400 moulds and 20 materials, mainly engineering resins. The plant employs about 375 people and operates 24 hours a day, five days a week.

Putting Out Fires

For a long time, Krzyzewski spent most of his time waiting for problems--this mould's not ready, that resin is out of stock, this machine has a hydraulic leak, that operator is unavailable. "We found ourselves continually caught in a reactionary mode," says Krzyzewski. "We were always fighting fires. When everybody's surprised, it becomes an unpleasant work environment."

To get back to the basics, he turned to Peter Afif and his company, International Plastics Consultants Corp. (Stamford, Connecticut, USA). Afif introduced Nyloncraft to the War Room strategy, and nothing has been the same at Nyloncraft since.

The philosophy behind the War Room strategy is simple. "There are only 24 hours in a day," notes Afif. "You can only make up lost time by working extra hours." To combat this lost time, all plant employees must have access to the information they need to anticipate and prepare for the problems that plague every moulder--no material, broken machine, mould not ready, operator out sick.

"You must stop every 24 hours to rigorously evaluate your production performance over the last 24 hours," says Afif. This evaluation, he says, is best done in the morning, in a designated War Room, with production issues listed and followed on large charts or white boards. Afif likes to see leaders from every department attend; this includes engineering, manufacturing, tooling, sales, and upper management.

The final key is to quantify all downtime in terms of money lost, Afif says. He notes that many moulders know when their presses are performing below standard, but they don't know what that substandard production is costing them. When you know exactly how much money is going out the door, you can prioritize your trouble spots more easily. "When you say you lost 2 hours on the big machine that runs at US$ 150/hour, you know you just threw out US$ 300," says Afif. Every second of downtime has a common measure: money.

Anticipate and Plan

Nyloncraft does all of its planning and anticipating every morning in the War Room, which is also the office of David Gill, the manufacturing manager. Attending are supervisors for quality control, tooling, engineering, manufacturing; the controller; and a sales representative. Each day, this group exchanges information on the last 24 hours, tracking on large, white erasable boards uptime, downtime, accidents, problems, shortages, daily scrap, production efficiency, and customer concerns.

Every problem reported and listed on the white boards is assigned a descriptive code such as no operator, no material, engineering adjustment, tooling, start-up processing, maintenance, and no orders. Each problem is then assigned to a supervisor to be addressed.

The goal of the War Room meeting is to determine what's right and wrong, and how to get all presses up to standard; it is not a finger-pointing contest. "You can't change what happened yesterday," says Gill. "You can only learn by it and work to prevent it from happening again."

"You're eliminating the reactionary mode and replacing it with planning," says Krzyzewski. "It's kind of like SPC for the entire plant." Every supervisor leaves the meeting with three action items, prioritized projects that cover everything from ordering new materials to fixing a press gauge, to swapping out moulds on a machine. The biggest difference is better communication.

"The War Room meetings get the focus of the department manager who needs to address that problem," he says. Projects remain on the board until they are completed. During the day, anyone in the plant can walk into the War Room and look at the boards to see who's working on what, or to check machine efficiencies. Data is collected daily and then added to weekly, monthly, and yearly summaries.

The most important daily summary measures production efficiency. Nyloncraft knows that it should, for example, produce US$ 155,000 worth of product a day. One of the white boards shows day-to-day totals of efficiency compared to the standard. All of the summaries are posted with month-to-month totals for all to see.

The results? Machine uptime averages about 80 percent. Sales have increased, but increased efficiency allows Nyloncraft to accommodate without overextending itself. Overtime is a rarity and morale is significantly better, Krzyzewski says. "People don't feel like they're making mistakes every day." The improved communication flows upward; senior management is better informed and more aware of the issues supervisors and operators face on the floor.