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Problem. A cabinetmaking company had built high-end, custom and semi-custom wooden
cabinets for years,
but was inefficiently using expensive materials,
due to flaws in the raw wood stock they received.
A company co-owner described the situation, "We used to be able to buy better quality
stock; but now, there are a lot of color flaws, splits,
knots, and warps. We can have our drawings and
templates all ready, but people on the work floor are
spending a lot of time figuring out how to get the most out of
the stock we have, because of these flaws."
He continued, "This added
time for our thirty-eight production people, sorting through
material and figuring out the cuts is killing us.
And our material waste cost is sky-high. We're
going to go broke if we don't do something soon."
Solution. The Team Manager (TM) formed a
Solutions Team to research and test possible remedies.
Each piece of stock had different flaws, making this problem particularly complex.
However,
after some research and brainstorming - they found an
off-the-shelf
computer software package that could quickly lay-out each piece of material, note its flaws, and then superimpose cutting patterns
on it. With this, all material layouts could be done in the
office, prior to sending the job to the work floor.
The TM sent the owners a
brief description of the solution. At first, they
were hesitant, but after their questions were answered, they
agreed to buy the software package and try it. The T-21
Team produced a detailed plan for how the system would work
and the company was soon using the new software and procedures on every job. The
T-21 plan specified:
- As stock arrives at the
company, each piece is marked with an ID-number and
its graphical depiction is entered into the computer,
including the exact location and size of its flaws (identified by
type-code).
- All planning for a job is
done in the office, by using a computer to search
through drawings in the stock material files (#1 above), to
identify the best piece for that job.
- Using the
same computer, job
cutting template patterns are graphically superimposed on the
image of the identified stock piece (#2 above) and printed by the
computer.
- The floor workers then
receive printed sheets, showing the ID-number of the
stock piece to pull for work and a scaled-drawing of
how to cut the work pieces from it.
Results. After
a few months, one of the
owners told their T-21 TM, "At
first, I wasn't so sure about this thing; but now that we've used it
awhile, I don't know how we ever got along without it. It
works! All they do on the floor is look at the
print-out, pull the piece called for, and cut it like the
computer print-out says."
"Floor time is reduced
almost 18% and we've reduced scrap waste by over 37%," he continued,
"We
added one person in the office for job planning, but we've saved
the time of almost seven floor workers. That's
major! We couldn't be happier with it."
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