Application of Set in Order
The 5S has been useful for the industrial process in a bid to minimize time wastage as well as enhance efficiency in the workplace. In the industrial process, Set in Order is often used to help employees establish where every necessary staff is located to limit time wastage (Ward & Sobek II, 2014). It is important for the employee to get the things they need right away. However, when the tools are returned, they should often be on the place so that others can also find them when needed. The step asserts that everything should be set in a place where it is retrieved or accessed very quickly. At the same time returning it should be as quickly as possible. It thus requires that what is needed to do the job is set, where it should be located is identified, and the needed number of items to efficiently perform the job (Reinertsen, 2009). The factory is facing overproduction issues as well as time wastage in packaging. As a result, the factory is defective in several ways. To effectively reduce waste, the factory should thus produce according to demand, and also, increase the number of staff at the packaging point.
There are only two employees assigned at the package thus causing longer wait for packaging
Overproduced tissues stored between machines
Recommendations for improving the performance of the factory
There is undoubted need to improve the factory’s performance. The following steps will help improve the performance
Re-engineering the manufacturing system-The factory should reorganize the assembly and fabrications systems into necessary cells (Tenescu & Teodorescu, 2014). It should also create the linked-cell system. The factory suffers overproduction due to uncontrolled production line thus leading to waste. It is important that the factory adopts a process that can enable controlled production of tissues. System re-engineering will also help assess the impact of the deployed business process and identify potential defects in the system by enhancing the cell efficiency.
Setup reduction-The cell setup time should be way less than the manual time taken by the worker to perform tasks. Workers will take more time in loading or offloading as well as packaging (Tenescu & Teodorescu, 2014). It will result in longer wait times between product packaging. The factory should equally adopt the quick change-over and processes and procedures in the operations. It will help reduce the lead-times by reducing the setup time.
Integrate quality control-One of the problems faced by the factory is defective products (Tenescu & Teodorescu, 2014). It is important to integrate quality control into the manufacturing processes to help rationalize and harmonize the quality of tissues produced. It will enable the factory to minimize defects on products from manufacturing by producing products that are 100% in quality.
Level, balance, sequence, synchronize-The factory should eliminate final assembly fluctuations (Tenescu & Teodorescu, 2014). Also, the output should equal the demand. The company produces beyond what is demanded and as such should be rationalized to equal.
Integrate preventive maintenance-The factory should train the workers to be able to perform low-level maintenance to reduce chances of system failure (Pampanelli et al., 2014). Certain failures should be dealt with by workers instantly to reduce time wastage. As such workers should have the expertise low-level understanding of system maintenance.
Production control-The factory should ensure that the organized cells respond to the demand by delivering the products according to demand as well as within the time needed (Pampanelli et al., 2014).
Integrate suppliers-The factory needs to minimize the number of suppliers as well as have a single supplier of the manufacturing components.
Automation-The factory should enhance 100% inspection to help deal with overproduction (Pampanelli et al., 2014). It is evident that overproduction is one of the problems faced by the factory thus should move to limit it. The problems of overproduction is due to lacking inspection that enhances accountable use of resources according to demand. It thus leads the output to exceed the required production.
References
Pampanelli, A. B., Found, P., & Bernardes, A. M. (2014). A Lean & Green Model for a production cell. Journal of cleaner production, 85, 19-30.
Reinertsen, D. G. (2009). The principles of product development flow: second generation lean product development (Vol. 62). Redondo Beach: Celeritas.
Tenescu, A., & Teodorescu, M. (2014). Lean Manufacturing: a concept towards a sustainable management. Communications in Applied Sciences,2(1), 97.
Ward, A. C., & Sobek II, D. K. (2014). Lean product and process development. Lean Enterprise Institute.
