Companion Line OEE ImprovementAs part of the Analyse phase the project team looked into the data from the Measure phase, the data collected in on the hour-by-hour boards and also the data integrated from our in process monitoring system. This data showed up a number of interesting finds. We noted that short stops & raw commodity in house supply, rather than prolonged periods of equipment downtime were the main causes of the poor line performance.
In order for our process to move closer to the desired OEE target of 70%, the machine requires an improved takt time, as can be seen from the diagram below this takt time value needed to reduce from 3.10 seconds to 2.62 seconds, this is a reduction of 0.48 seconds in the current takt time value.
The Companion Line is validated to run at 30 units per minute, taking into account 40 minutes for scheduled breaks during an 8 hour shift, there is an overall potential for a Companion Line takt time of 2 seconds, but that would be in an ideal world!!!
Looking at the data from both our on the line hour-by-hour boards and the production monitoring system, the following data was became available:
Breakdown of the top 5 short stop hitters on the Companion Line taken from the on line hour-by-hour boards, in week one of the Companion Line OEE improvement project:
From our analysis of the data gathered during the Measure phase of the Companion Line improvement project it became clear that the issues affecting the line performance were not solely machine related, operator reaction time to machine short stops/faults, the duration of the operator clearing those simple machine short stops/faults and also the replenishment of raw material to the Line affected the overall performance of the line.
With those factors in mind, the project team set about looking at the different aspect of the individual problems by trying to get to the root cause of the problems that were holding back the line performance.
As can be seen from the bar chart above, one of the big hitters relating to Line stops was the Paper Banding issue on our assembly machine, in order to get to the route cause of the multiple number of short stops generated by this station, an Route Cause Analysis (RCA) of the station was carried out:
Picture illustrating a Companion finished & paper banded set:
As part of the RCA into the Paper Banding issue an on the line RCA meeting was held, at this meeting the project team and in house Paper Band subject matter experts gathered to tease out the problem at hand around a company RCA board as can be seen below:
An RCA study of the Paper Band adhesive peal torque was carried out, the in house peal torque spec is 0.4 to 0.8 lb/sf, see below histogram of results
As can be seen from the Histogram analysis of the paper banding issue on the Companion line, the peal torque values are not evenly distributed form the sample of 118 taken. This leads us into the next phase of the DMAIC project, "Improve" where we looked at measures to improve our paper banding process, operator training / engagement and line commodity replenishment.
