WHAT COULD KAIZEN DO FOR YOU?

Transcription

1 WHAT COULD KAIZEN DO FOR YOU?

2 HOW LEAN INSIGHTS LEAD TO UNEXPECTED OPPORTUNITIES TO REDUCE COSTS. Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning. Ben Franklin

3 MANY WAYS TO UNCOVER NEW EFFICIENCIES. RMF helps customers reduce costs and time in: Design for manufacturability Tooling for metal fabrication Metal manufacturing processes - Punching, cutting, forming, stamping, rolling Welding and fastening Finishing Assembly Packaging and shipping With today s shortened product lifecycle, there isn t much time to make money. It s all hands on deck to maximize efficiency and keep costs down. The good news is there s always room for improvement if you know where to look. It s not just about cutting the cost of individual components. It s about examining the whole supply chain more closely.

4 That s the spirit of Kaizen, a scientific, collaborative approach to uncovering opportunities for lower costs and greater value overall. Interested in Kaizen for your product? Here s a look at how it works, based on RMF s experience achieving numerous Kaizen-driven improvements for our customers. WHAT IS KAIZEN? Literally change for the better in Japanese, Kaizen in a business sense refers to continuous improvement and the elimination of waste. Developed in Japan after World War II and brought to the West in the 1980s, today the concept is recognized worldwide as a pillar of competitive sustainability. Kai: Change Zen: Good

5 IT BEGINS WITH A CROSS- FUNCTIONAL TEAM Kaizen calls for close collaboration among all parties involved in design, manufacture and distribution at both the supplier and the customer. The approach involves identifying a goal for improvement and using real observations and facts to attack the root causes of problems. It s about deconstructing every step along the way: design, tooling, manufacturing, finishing, assembly, shipping, etc.

6 The underlying idea is that improvement is everyone s business, from the maintenance crew to the executive team. Together, you re looking not so much for a single, big breakthrough, but often small changes that, together, can lead to significant added value even the complete transformation of a process. At RMF, for example, we might spot a way to incorporate lower-cost soft tooling, or perhaps remove an assembly step anything that can reduce total cost and speed up a process while maintaining quality standards. 3 KEYS TO KAIZEN SUCCESS 1. Cross-functional team members for a full understanding of all elements of design and production 2. Strong collaboration and an open mind for effective problem solving 3. Consideration of entire value stream for maximum impact

7 A RECENT EXAMPLE OF KAIZEN IN ACTION A customer came to us seeking to redesign a product to take cost out. To start, RMF assembled a cross-functional team to examine the complete product in question, including all of its components and assembly processes. The team soon determined that, along with minor design changes to simplify the assembly, the majority of the cost savings would come from focusing on aspects other than just the design.

8 As a team, we then delved into other steps, including the sub-assembly of components by RMF to simplify the customer s assembly labor and the optimization of shipping container volume to reduce shipping cost. After 2 days intensively exploring the issues, we emerged with a plan to convert the previous 20 individual components into one complete subassembly (incorporating efficient Avdel riveting) shipped to the customer in a finished goods box. These changes are poised to: Increase overall throughput from point of order to delivery Dramatically increase the customer s final assembly speed from several days to several hours Reduce inventory volume by 80% Decrease shipping space needed to 50%

9 READY TO TRY IT FOR YOUR PRODUCT? Whether you re looking to Lean out a design with fewer components, incorporate poka-yoke features or simplify a final assembly, the engineers of RMF are ready to help. Phone: ABOUT RMF Racine Metal-Fab Ltd. helps design engineers get great ideas to market fast. Customers turn to us for a collaborative design process, prototypes in as little as three days and rigorous troubleshooting efforts to bring your product to market faster and help you keep it in production as long as possible. Learn more at