SLR has a team of over 1800 professionals delivering advice and support from a network of offices across Europe, Asia-Pacific, Africa, Canada, the USA and Latin America. Our expanded service offering means we can provide a unique blend of leadership, management, consulting, engineering and training services to businesses of all sizes across the process and allied industries. We can draw on many more ‘in house’ skills and services, including process, civil and structural engineering, environmental permitting and compliance, air quality, flood risk, ecology, acoustics and wastewater treatment.
Marley Plumbing & Drainage
Manufacturing & Packaging
The Challenge
Lean implementation programme
The first stage of the Marley Plumbing and Drainage lean implementation programme was to identify where waste could be removed from the overall production system and then to develop an ongoing lean implementation plan for improvement.
The key findings of the VSM activity were the plant operated with:
Utilising our unique hands on approach to knowledge transfer, the lean implementation team at Lenham undertook Value Stream Mapping activity for a number of specific value streams.
The Solution
Lean Implementation Plan
In order to address these key issues the team, led throughout by our consultants, developed a lean implementation plan to improve flexibility and reduce working capital
Changeover Time
Reduce Changeover time to allow for small batch manufacture
Pull Based Production System
The site lean implementation team were then tasked with developing a production system which would enable a significant reduction in working capital, and a rollout plan to apply the approach to other key value streams across the business
Key Value Stream
Roll out the approach to other key value streams across the business
Key Services
Business Diagnostics
Lean Thinking
A Value Stream Mapping exercise gave those involved a better understanding of the process and highlighted potential opportunities for improvement.
Lean Tools & Techniques
Improved Flexibility
Changeover reduction techniques employed to improve flexibility and allow for small batch manufacture
Supply Chain & Planning
Working Capital Reduction
Development and implementation of a pull based production system enabled working capital to be reduced, and provided a model for other key value streams within the business
The Results
The site lean implementation team developed a production system which enabled a significant reduction in working capital
The first stage of this process resulted in simplification of the warehousing and dispatch activity used to service both retail and trade based customers. Using our lean expertise, the team then developed a production system that scheduled production based on products dispatched from this central warehouse.
In order to minimise downtime an optimum production campaign was developed which eventually gave the facility a standard production plan. This plan enabled volume products to be made weekly and products with limited customer requirements to be made fortnightly or monthly as demanded. The plan also enabled time to be set aside for maintenance and operational improvements to be made on equipment which was traditionally highly utilised.
Initially the production system was set up using a traditional T-Card based system to visually display production loading. This has since been superseded by a visual computer system which displays production requirements at point of manufacture.
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