Unexpected damage to one of the customer’s facilities had prompted a rapid relocation of five production cells to a new facility a couple hours away. Essential production activities were performing below target due to the quick set-up and new workforce. The customer needed immediate help to increase throughput and meet rising customer demand.

Upon arrival at the facility, IET engineers went to the shop floor to assess the situation. The top priority was raising throughput in a robotic bender cell followed by doing so as efficiently as possible. Two areas required immediate attention: reduce production delays and improve cycle times on constraint operations. IET’s engineers utilized delay study and time study techniques to collect real world data that would indicate what specific improvements were needed. During the course of gathering data, IET elevated “low-hanging fruit” opportunities to the management team and cost effective solutions were implemented as soon as possible.

Within two weeks, IET’s findings indicated that the constraint operation was losing at least 10% of its allocated capacity due to specific, avoidable delays. In addition, direct observation of the robot revealed opportunities to reduce cycle time by optimizing programs. Time study data proved that labor could be reduced 20% with some methods improvements and simple layout changes. IET’s analysis also showed that sufficient unused capacity existed to convert selected part families from long-cycle manual bending to short-cycle robotic bending, thereby increasing throughput and labor efficiency. These recommendations provided a roadmap for the customer to begin closing the productivity gap.