Improvement via Kaizen events

Recently, I had the opportunity to participate in a Kaizen event at our facility, which has about 150 employees. The event focused on improving the assembly of one of our electronic counters and reducing past-due orders. Prior to the event, I took time studies of the assembly of these units.

A typical Kaizen event runs from Monday through Friday. Each day is an all-day affair, even working through lunch. The participating group usually consists of people from various disciplines in the company. The core group includes employees from the department or cell the event is targeting, purchasing, engineering and quality. A department manager or supervisor participates during the first day, along with a facilitator, which, in our case, was the vice president of operations. The quality engineer was our event leader.

On Monday morning, the facilitator conducted training on how to participate in the event and defined the issues and goals. We discussed how long it took to assemble a counter. Based on my time studies, it took 35 minutes, on average. Our goal was 18 minutes, which seemed like a daunting task.

We observed and kept close track of where the assemblers went to gather their parts. I then generated a “spaghetti chart” of where they went. We were surprised at how much time was wasted.

At the end of each day, we discussed our accomplishments and whether we were on track to complete the improvement by the end of the week. The facilitator was apprised of what we did and what we planned to do next.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, we evaluated where we could make room in or near the cell to place parts that were stored a long way from the cell. We rearranged the cell, found room across the aisle for those parts and reconfigured the racks to handle them. In addition, purchasing spoke to a couple of vendors about changing the wiring configurations to lessen the assemblers’ work. One vendor could and the other couldn’t.