METAL SALES MANUFACTURING CORP.: Improving Changeover Time to Stay Competitive
The Center – Northeast helped us dramatically improve our changeover process. This allowed us to improve our throughput by eliminating wasteful downtime.
-- Leroy Eimers, General Manager
Metal Sales Manufacturing Corporation (www.metalsales.us.com) was founded in 1963. By 1966, the company was delivering orders of custom-cut, ready-to-install metal roofing and siding panels with matching accessories to customers within seven to 10 days. Today, Metal Sales owns and operates 21 manufacturing facilities in 17 states across America, serving the residential, commercial and agricultural building market. Their Bay City, Mich., facility employs 30.
Challenge
Metal Sales receives orders for many variations of metal roof panels and accessories, including different colors and panel profiles. Each time a different panel profile is needed, the machine operators must change the die sets. This process was taking more than an hour for each setup, significantly draining productivity. Since quick turnaround of orders is a competitive requirement in this industry, Metal Sales employees were forced to work a great deal of overtime in order to meet customer demand and stay competitive.
Solution
The Michigan Manufacturing Technology Center (The Center) – Northeast facilitated a Quick Changeover Improvement Event (Kaizen) to address the changeover process for die sets. Team members involved in the training included machine operators, supervisors and the manager of the process. As a team, they filmed the changeover, mapped out the process and then analyzed it to identify any waste. Finally, the team redesigned the changeover process to be substantially more efficient. As a follow-up, The Center and the Metal Sales team streamlined the crating process, which led to considerable increases in productivity and safety.
Results
- Reduced changeover time by 50%
- Increased throughput by 10%
- Reduced the cost of changeover by more than 50%