The smartest manufacturing companies are able to do things faster, more cheaply and with significantly less waste than their competitors. Most have realised that utilising accurate data to manage themselves and service their customers is key in helping them to achieve this.
Recognising this to be true, Euan Douglas, Continuous Improvement & QA Manager at Kanthal's Perth plant, chose Gemba Solutions real-time production efficiency software to help him.
Kanthal, part of the Sandvik Group, manufacture heating systems that generate, control, protect against and measure heat. Initially, Euan used the software to monitor activities in the Extrusion Area, and discovered that the availability of the main extruder was significantly lower than it should have been. As the Extrusion Area directly feeds Kanthal's electricity-hungry furnaces, any inefficiencies here can have a seriously detrimental effect on costs.
Based on the data that the system collected, the Production Support Team at Kanthal worked with the team of operators to identify improvement opportunities and created an action plan to drive the changes through.
Over the following 4 weeks, availability of the extruder increased by 25%. Euan comments, "We have significantly increased our availability already, and there are definitely further improvements to be made. Having hard and irrefutable data on machine downtime to show our team leaders and operators is an extremely powerful and useful tool."
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