cutting team. This team consists of two men—the sawer and the
tailor. The sawer is responsible for saw setup, as well as lumber
retrieval and optimization, while the tailor stacks and labels the cut
lumber for assembly. Mr. Alvarez explained that his major concern
was the amount of setup time required by the cutting teams. He said
that up to 45% of production time was spent adjusting the saws for
each job, a very typical problem in batch production. This is where
Wiley’s problem and our challenge began.
Process Improvement
After our initial plant tour, where we noted the large amount of workin-process inventory waiting in carts between the saws and the
assembly stations, we spent a day interviewing workers on the
assembly teams. It was brought to our attention that at certain points
during the day the backup of WIP carts was in fact problematic, from
the standpoint of worker safety and from the ability to locate the
required cart quickly and easily. There are approximately 80 to 90
carts in use at any given time, which are loaded with raw materials on
a per-job basis and are tagged with a work order. After the carts are
loaded and tagged, they are placed in front of the assembly
workstations. Copies of the work orders are taken to the plant control
office. The plant supervisor then assigns the jobs to assembly stations
by placing the work order copy in assigned bins located on the plant
control office wall. The assembly employees will go to their assigned
bin, pick their next job ticket, and then locate the corresponding cart
for that job. Mr. Alvarez mentioned that locating the cart required for
the next job could take anywhere from one to ten minutes depending
on the assembly backup (number of full carts used that day) and the
location of the cart within the facility. The manufacturing employees
are tracked on a 100th-of-the-hour time basis for work, which means
that there should, in theory, be very little unproductive time during the
day, with the exception of break periods. This also reduces
socialization of employees.