The die cast die business for the client had been declining over the past few years. The client had greatly expanded their marketing activity and had successfully been awarded contracts to machine large rotational components for a number of emerging industries. The change in product volume and workflow had disrupted the plant and caused late delivery issues. IET was challenged to assist the client in three key areas:

• Increasing capacity
• Improving overall performance
• Reducing lead-time

IET began by conducting plant wide work sampling studies to document the amount of time machines were actually running and the reasons for downtime. Value stream maps were created for each product family and historical results were evaluated.

IET presented the results to the management team and facilitated a “Problem Definition” session where key issues were identified and ranked using nominal group technique.

The overall consensus was that scheduling and communication issues due to ineffective process planning were the root of the delivery problems. IET developed an Excel based scheduling model that was used to plan and track actual job progress through the shop. An IET engineer was assigned to the plant to gather routing data, input the data in the plan and distribute the reports developed to communicate the schedule to each of the work centers.

After several months of improved performance, IET assisted the client into a conversion to an ERP system that encompasses purchasing, inventory control, production planning, sales and accounting activities in one database.