| The article introduced systemically how to use the current limited resource, from people, machine, material, method, environment etc. to improve the productivities by using of six sigma and lean methodology and tools to meet additional capacity requirement due to marketing growing in Ming Yuan Company.1. Problem statementThe purpose for an entity running is gain of max. profits by min. investment , Paint marketing is growing very fast specially in Asia Pacific in 2008, appx. 30%.Per Sales forecast of 2008, Ming Yuan company need production volume about 1,855tons for Primer Surface (PS), which can satisfy customer demand. However, the actual production volume for this product group in 2007 was only 840tons, the capacity will be 1100tons according to current production cycle time, it seems that we can not meet customer demand significantly. Which will result in 10.8MMRMB profit loss per year. It is unacceptable; we must take actions to improve productivities.So the company expected to do a cycle time reduction project by using of six sigma and lean methodology/tools to achieve the capacity target and without any additional investments. The target will be reduce cycle time in monthly average from current 7.4days to 48hours, improve 60% of productivities; the project will be finished at end do Jun 2008.2. MeasureIn order to find a realistic measurable characteristic that can accurately reflect productivity improvement, the project defined Y which is month production cycle time in hours per batch per month.This cycle time included every step from loading, grinding, composing, testing, adjusting, filling and packing. The data during Jan-Oct 2007 was collected, the average Y was 118hours, process capability was very low, Zbench=-5.79, it is out of customer requirement, if the Zbench >3, could be satisfy customer requirement.3. AnalyseThe article applied many lean and six sigma tool in analyse phase, it made sense.(1)VSM AnalysisVSM means value stream mapping. It provided visual able observe son of materials or information flow, the data shown can indicate process performance. It also help project team to high level analyse the process.VSM have 3 mainly portions:1st is material stream: Start of receiving of raw materials from Supplier and end of delivery of finish product to customer.2nd is value stream: Raw materials changed to finish product, which is value added process.3rd is information stream: the supporting information for achieving of both of material and value stream.(2)Pareto Chart analysisPareto chart showed the hours needed for each of production step, ranking from bigger to smaller. Which was grinding, adjusting, testing, loading, composing, filling and packing.(3)Fish-bore AnalyzeFurther analyze and looking for the vital Xs by fish-bore chart. Such as recipe, QC lab layout, production process not leverage etc. Recipe, QC layout, unbalanced production are vital Xs.4. ImproveHow to improve it significantly even we find the root cause? The article gave the creative thinking during improvement.(1)Improve recipe. The know-how about paint manufacturing is recipe, so how to simplify process by optimizing of recipe; it is what we desired in this article. After a lot of lab test, Technical team finally found a good way to optimize the recipe by getting inspiration from Auto accessibly. It was: instead of loading raw materials one by one, firstly load the un-grinded materials what are the small molecules as an semi-finish product, we say it as balance clear, and also we categorized different group dispersions as semi-finish product, and set up some storage in workshop, when we get a order, we only need mix balance clear and dispersions together and adjust viscosity and color by solvent and resin etc. it can extremely reduce the cycle time.(2)QC improvement.Testing is no value added activity; the project will focus on process control rather than final testing for product. Meanwhile, the waste was pretty increased by un-reasonable lab layout and equipment layout. E.g. the labs was located in three independent buildings, test equipments did not follow test flow and so on. Thus we conducted a Kaizen Event, reorganized labs and equipments during 1 week, did 5S activities, completely improved testing cycle time and eliminated many wastes in QC.(3)Production improvement.Mainly were given by below smaller projects.â‘ Kanban for dispersion storage.â‘¡Optimize dispersion productions.â‘¢Optimize process parameters for dispersion grinding.5. ControlDepend on above improvement actions, the production cycle time for Primer surface products have significant improvement, which reduced from d118hrs to 35 hrs, so the created control plan and standard operation procedures fixed the effects of improvement. And review them regularly.The conclusion from the above improvement result are as following,1.The product design is the most important.2.Internal work should change to external work. 3.Flexible to understand customer requirement, enhance company's response capability.4. Apply lean and six sigma theory completely on production.The article states that the theory and methodology is effective, the corporate will get more capacity if extend to other product family. It can bring the corporate to good position in marketing. |
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