Page 6 - Demo

6 | January 2024 Slippery Rock Gazette
Training & Education
RECAPTURE 10% OF YOUR CAPACITY TODAY TIM WOODS
Transportation – Moving product from one place to another.
• How many carts do you have? How many forklifts do you have? How many
cranes do you have? They are all moving product from one place to another.
• How many people do you have who spend time moving product around the
plant?
• How far do the parts travel? It can be an eye-opening exercise to actually
measure the number of feet a piece of stone travels through your facility.
• How often do you move things just to get them out of the way or to move
them aside so something else can use that space? How much time do your folks spend doing that?
Inventory – Material or product that is in your plant but is not having value added work done to it right now.
• Inventory correlates directly to lead time. Higher levels of inventory equals longer lead time. To shorten your lead time, you need to lower the amount of Work In Process (WIP) inventory.
• How many jobs do you have in process from template to install? Are all of them being worked on right now? Is every piece from every job having value added work done to it right now?
o Add up all the pieces from all the jobs in your plant and then count the ones that are having value added work being done to them at that moment. All the pieces that aren’t having value added work done to them are unnecessarily extending your lead time.
o Ask yourself why those pieces are not being worked on. Also ask yourself how many pieces you can reasonably process at any given time.
• You are not making fine wine or cheese. This inventory does not get better with age. How often have you had a piece get damaged while sitting on a cart? How often have you had a customer make a change to a job after you already cut the slab? Nothing good comes from this inventory sitting still.
Motion – Excess movement by people • This includes:
o People picking up and moving products and supplies
o People walking to get supplies or information
o Loading or unloading a workstation
o Reaching for or walking to get tools and supplies (think installers) o Excessive reaching or turning
o Heavy lifting
This document was
Could You Use an Additional Ten Percent Production Capacity?
developed to help you find ways to free up capacity (page 2 shown). It details eight categories of NVA activities with definitions and examples. You can use it as you walk around the plant to discover capacity you can free up.
Would you like to be able to process 10% more square footage through your plant every day—without capital investment, without adding people, and without working additional hours?
You can get that very quickly if you apply the simple principles outlined in this article.
You might be in the fabrication busi- ness but, at its core, your company is in business to perform value-added ser- vices that your customers are willing to pay for. They are willing to pay you for transforming slabs of granite (or other material) into countertops for their home or business. Your customers value that transformation. That’s what they pay you to do.
The pure definition of value added is the physical transformation of mate- rial into something the customer is willing to pay for.
Everything else is non-value added. The maximum amount of square foot- age that your plant can process in a day is defined by the quantity of value-added hours that you execute that day. A val- ue-added process would be something like the work done at a saw. Tasks like ordering slabs or repairing chips, while necessary to do, are non-value added.
The goal is to eliminate or reduce the time spent on non-value-added activities.
While processing stone through the saw is a value-added process step, not every activity performed at the saw is value added. The only value-added portion of this process step is when the blade is actually cutting the stone. Everything else is non-value added.
This includes programming the machine, loading the slab, unloading the cut pieces, cleaning the machine. All these activities may be necessary, but they are not value added. The ideal solu- tion is to eliminate those activities. This can be challenging for the saw operation.
Ed Young
Fabricator’s Business Coach
However, if you work at it, you can find ways to reduce the time required to do those activities.
TIP: To give you an idea how much time is spent on NVA at the saw, stand there and watch the saw run. Use your wristwatch or cell phone to track the time the blade is in the stone compared to the total time you are there. The results may surprise you.
Eliminating or reducing the time for performing non-value-added activities frees up the capacity of the people and machines you already have so they can perform more value-added activities.
I’ve developed a spreadsheet to help you track the opportunities you uncover, and to document the improvements you implement. It will also help you calculate the amount of capacity you are freeing up.
Executing this well across your plant can easily free up 10% additional capac- ity in your plant.
To help you look for more ways to reduce non-value-added time, I have put together a detailed document and an easy to use spreadsheet that gives you more examples of VA and NVA along with a simple way to track the changes you are making.
These tools are available free on the Free Tools tab of my website, www. FabricatorsCoach.com .
In addition to having run a countertop fabrication shop, Ed has also helped many fab shop owners become very successful. He is a seasoned manufacturing manager and coach who has helped hundreds of companies from single person startups to large international corporations. As a for- mer business owner, he understands the responsibility to make payroll while also satisfying customers. Ed can be reached at Ed@FabricatorsCoach.com .
Reduce the Chaos | Make More Money | Get Your Life Back
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