By Michael Mitchell and Scott Fairbanks
This article first appeared in
Manufacturing
& Technology News
An operation at a plant in Terre
Haute, Indiana, that required 13 operators to produce
369 products per man-hour, cut labor needs to only
three operators while boosting throughput to 2,715
products per man-hour in just over one year.
The products are compact discs for the Sony video
game. The plant is one of the Sony Disc Manufacturing
facilities in the United States. The boost in production
was made through automation, attrition and attention
to the principle of Kaizen, the Japanese word for
continuous improvement. It’s a process that involves
everyone in the plant, from equipment operators to
department managers working together. Success is achieved
without layoffs.
Allegiance to the Kaizen principle has allowed the
Terre Haute facility, the first CD manufacturing plant
in the U.S., which Sony purchased from CBS in 1983,
to move from the then unthinkable goal of producing
300,000 CDs per month to today’s capability to
turn out 27 million CDs per month. In a crunch, the
plant can produce more than 29 million CDs as it did
in October 1999.
Kaizen is a team concept that means continuous
and incremental improvement at all levels: machine
operators, middle manager and even the CEO are part
of the process. The Kaizen umbrella covers just-in-time
inventory, zero defects, quality circles and suggestion
systems. Basically, you take a look at your operations
and you eliminate everything that’s wasteful.
Waste, known as "muda" in Japanese, is everything
that does not add value. Muda is the deadly enemy
of value creation. The eight deadly muda are:
If you can drive that kind of waste out of your process
and stay vigilant about it, then you've reached
the heart of Kaizen.
Here's where the art of standardization becomes
your friend. You have to rigorously standardize
your processes if you are going to rigorously improve
them.
Maintaining your best processes and improving
them involves two key activities, what we call
two-cycle wheels. The first cycle is for maintaining
your best processes, which is the day-to-day concern
of operators and technicians. The other is the improvement
cycle, which is generally the responsibility of the
management and engineering staffs.
Management and technical staff have the lead responsibility
for improvements in the standardization processes.
But they don't act in a vacuum. They spend the
majority of their time on the factory floor, measuring
compliance with the Kaizen-driven plan, looking at
the manufacturing process from the individual perspective
of each employee.
With the emphasis on automation, cycle time on the
CD lines has been drastically driven down in this
process. Gone, for example, are the batch process
lines of the late 1980s. The Terre Haute plant makes
discs faster than anybody in the world.
It does so with fewer employees. Yet the company
has not laid off any workers. The head count has dropped
from a high of about 1,500 employees to its current
status of just under 1,000 all through attrition.
Kaizen improves the morale of employees by removing
drudgery from work and developing pride in seeing
individual ideas implemented.
Automatic guided vehicles carry supplies and discs
from one station to another. Everything is automated
from retrieving manufacturing supplies to the manufacturing
process itself, even the stacking of packed boxes
of discs on a pallet for shipping.
Kaizen and the Video Game Cartoning
Line
The improvement to the video game cartoning line
typifies the success of the program. The video
game system launched by Sony in the mid-1990s has
quickly become a staple product for the plant, particularly
during the second half of each year. Discs for the
game can account for nearly half the CDs made at Terre
Haute during the late summer and early fall.
To start the process, a team of 17 — from the
plant director of production operations to seven packaging
operators — was assembled to examine the operation
and identify problems. With the operation shut down,
the team discussed problems that they identified and
added the concerns of team members. The team developed
a list of 34 steps in station operation that could
be improved, from e-stop location to the labeler.
At its next meeting, the team generated possible
solutions for each of the issues. The problems were
categorized based on their impact on the operation.
Then the list was divided into low cost, quick fixes
and engineering improvements. Every suggestion for
improvement had to consolidate, automate, eliminate
or simplify in order to be considered.
The objective was to make the process more efficient
and the job easier for the operators as quickly
as possible without investing much money. Within days,
low-cost improvements were implemented.
During the process, all the improvements were identified
in Kaizen story boards that tell the story of this
specific continuous improvement and give credit to
the team participants. These Story Boards, with the
names of all participants, are displayed near the
line and updated periodically.
Here are some of the simple and incremental improvements
that were accomplished within weeks and which reduced
the number of station operators from 13 to seven,
while raising standard throughput from 4,800 to 8,679
and the number of discs per man-hour from 369 to 1,240:
To supplement these physical alterations, there was
additional training for the core team and a reorganization
for easier access of the technical manuals. Once these
changes and improvements were accomplished, the team
moved on to identify and accomplish further incremental
improvements in the station operation.
Within eight months, engineering and automation
improvements that the team identified had been installed
by engineering to reduce the number of operators needed
at the video game cartoning line to four, while increasing
the standard throughput to 9,242 and the discs per
man-hour to 2,311.
These productivity improvements were accomplished
with semi-automatic master and automatic master cartoning,
a new roll stock labeling system, an automated tote
handling system and installation of a new semi-automatic
line. Even that was not the end. By mid 1999, only
three operators were needed to improve discs per-man-hour
to 2,715. Implementation of a robotic palletizer increased
throughput, eliminated two operators and overcame
ergonomic issues involved in the operators’ need
to be constantly bending. Savings: $118,400 annually,
with a payoff period of only 26 months.
Ergonomic issues were at the heart of a decision
to add a master carton loader that automatically loaded
three inner cartons of product into a master carton
and placed the carton on a conveyor to be palletized.
Savings: one person per line, per shift or $118,400
per year. Payoff period: 14 months.
Two operators were required to load PSX products
from totes into PSX cartons. The manual labor and
the inherent ergonomic problems were eliminated by
the installation of an automatic tote de-stacker.
By eliminating the two operators, the unit realized
annual savings of $236,800 with a payoff period of
5.1 months.
Lessons Learned
The Kaizen total involvement approach to improvements
follows a set of rules, policies, directives and procedures
established by management. The four basic steps in
making continual improvement involve: Plan, Do, Check,
Act. To maintain the improved states we Standardize,
Do, Check Standardization. One of the foundations
of plant Kaizen activities means documentation of
the best way to do the job.
Any manufacturing operation can benefit from Kaizen
as long as there is a commitment from management toward
total involvement in basic Kaizen tenets:
Sony Disc Manufacturing has made that commitment
and has reaped the rewards, enabling the company to
keep up with growing demand for our product while
cutting costs.
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