One of the customer’s facilities produced display boards for the roofing sector. It employed batch processing methods, which resulted in large amounts of WIP between operations and shingle pallets stacked on the floor wherever space allowed. The clutter of so many shingle pallets throughout the facility wasted time as operators searched for and “dug out” the pallet they needed. Business was booming. The facility had to increase productivity 50% without adding floor space to meet customer demands.

IET embarked on a process redesign project to remedy the situation. IET’s engineer time studied individual operations and then used the data to design a continuous flow assembly line on which labor was balanced and productive. Display board WIP was eliminated thereby freeing valuable floor space for adding more production capacity. The introduction of pallet racking allowed the plant to organize its shingle stock for one-touch retrieval. By changing from batch processing to continuous flow processing, throughput time dropped from days to hours and capacity increased 25%, all without adding floor space or additional equipment.