Increasing Performance in a Crowded Market
We were called into action by a large industrial customer who wanted to improve their production site in Shanghai. This site was experiencing high labor turnover rates and increasingly aggressive competition from new arrivals to the market.
Our task was to minimize delays and improve customer satisfaction in one production area. What we found was high defect rates, high labor force turnover, late deliveries and poor margins.
Our initial team was made up of operations groups, engineers, and business people. We listened to each group and developed an action plan. Our first step was implementing a process control system which included establishing a central database for machine diagnostics and root cause analysis of defects. After we had implemented these systems, we began using team-building and Lean efforts that focused on promoting blameless communication between different elements of the production team and aligning them to a unified purpose. This culture change combined with our process control system, resulted in a significant reduction in defects and more accurate documentation. The end result of these actions was an overall increase in revenue, customer satisfaction, and efficiency that was adopted across all other work cells at the site.
Additional results from this transformation were:
Reduction of labor force turnover from 110% to 9% within a year.
100% On-time delivery of products.
Revenue increased 30% along with a 6-fold increase in margin.
Production quality improved from 67% to 99.9% first pass yield (FPY) through the use of process control and Lean methods.
Winner of the Operations Excellence Award in 2015 from the Institute of Industrial Engineers
